G'day all,
>A lot of his work was very specific to his era, so that orthodox economists
>see his work as irrelevant. But his era -- the Gilded Age at the end of the
>19th century -- seems very similar to our own, so I can see his insights as
>being quite relevant now.
Bit of British understatement, perhaps?
After all, this was the bloke who:
- called churches 'retail outlets';
- discerned a society in which it was honourable to win wealth by force and
dignified gratuitously to flaunt that wealth;
- noted that invention becomes the mother of necessity by way of competitive
emulation;
- saw in the businessman a saboteur bent on extracting value by creating
disruption;
- perceived that the making of things and the accumulation of money are
anathema to each other; and ...
- predicted that our predatory order must either culminate in a deadly war
of all against all or be transformed into one controlled by the actual
makers of things.
I suppose it's all been true since the days of pay-as-you-go indulgences,
Colombuses, Dutch tulips, privateers on Spanish Mains and Hundred Years'
Wars, but here we sit, amidst our Praise The Lord 'ministries', our Donalds
and Ivanas, our NASDAQs and fake Calvin Kleins, our Bill Gateses, our
desolate Flints, and our Euro-American trade wars, eh?
Cheers,
Rob.
