Why the Assholes Are Winning: Money Trumps All
One of the great ironies of contemporary left-leaning commentators is that despite their insistence on paying attention to institutional factors that others allegedly neglect (see how Pfeffer constructs the popular but false dichotomy of "self-interest and profit maximization" versus "human well-being, longevity and happiness"), they are largely stuck in thinking in terms of the very same institutions they abhor. Effectively, the current approach is mostly fine, it just needs a few tweaks and reforms to turn it into a "social democracy".If money is the problem, then the solution is not to engage in petty social democratic welfare reforms, but to end the monopoly on currency and allow for communities and individuals to coordinate savings-investment decisions and account for their local capital using the denomination of currency that they have decided to create. This is the mutual credit solution as advocated by 19th century anarchists and a minority of monetary reformers since then.Pfeffer quotes Article 23 on the "right to work," and indeed full employment has always been a bizarre fetish for Keynesians, social democrats, Marxists and conservatives. The Protestant work ethic is the right-wing version of the labor theory of value. It is a contradiction how so many bemoan the supposed rat race working conditions and then advocate the "solution" of having the state put everyone into the rat race through full employment policy. Nowhere have I seen any social democratic reformer argue for artisanal crafts and decentralized governance. It's always more and more massive centralization. I will note it was the mercantilists who first provided economic rationales for full employment. And they went to great lengths to achieve it: anti-vagrancy and poor laws to forcefully turn people into serfs. The current proposals are more humane, but borne of the same logic of "to live is to toil".I will also note that a reason why formal models haven't focused that much on things like subjective utility and happiness is because those suffer from intractable aggregation problems. It's easy to speak of the "public interest" in colloquial language, it is brutally difficult to model and quantify it, actually drawing the line of how far it extends. Then, of course, interpersonal comparison of utility is fraught with issues because there is no measurement of utility as such. Robert Nozick's thought experiments have been good at illustrating this.This trite paternalistic reformism leads nowhere except to further exacerbation of instability.