WATCH – FROM 2010 (Posted for archival purposes) Small business people? Hardly.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/soros-obama-and-me/KRUGMAN WATCH – FROM 2010

(Posted for archival purposes)

Small business people? Hardly. That writing provides a limited return is not a measure of its level of consumption by a large number of customers, but a measure of how little people are willing to pay for it.

The term Mitch is looking for is not “entrepreneur” it is “Schumpeterian Intellectuals”: people who bring about the destruction of capitalism, the market and the prosperity of national competitiveness by undermining both the sentiment of, and capital structure of entrepreneurship.

Unfortunately, we don’t have special taxes for Shumpeterian market destroyers like we have special taxes on entrepreneurial market creators. But we can fix that. Perhaps we should level the playing field by heavily taxing political, extra-market goods and services, and lowering taxes on apolitical intra-market goods and services?

Wouldn’t that be a switch? I mean, why should the amount of income be the axis of measurement, rather than the service provided to the market? Under that measure we could confiscate all of Soros’ money, recover our losses from the bloated financial sector, and reduce the media to non-profit status, and make political writing an unprofitable exercise.

As for putting capital to a better purpose, that’s not yet proven. Soros was not participating in the market for goods and services by creating unemployment and reorganizing that capital. He’s just using remunerative coercion under state protections. And extra-market remunerative coercion at that. A form of coercion made possible only by the restraint of violence by others in order to create the somewhat free market – a restraint he does not himself employ. And while that asymmetry of restraint may not be apparent to your cult of those who are incapable of holding territory and trade routes, or building an durable government, or durable institutions of calculation and cooperation, it is not lost on those of us whose ancestors have done so for a millennia or more.

It seems odd to me that so many people fail to grasp just how entertaining and enjoyable civil war is for those people who practice militial restraint – often at high personal cost of forgone opportunity. Modern war is a ‘hell’ only for people who fight in the western model. It’s not for warriors, terrorists and raiders. We forget that the reason we cannot conquer the Afghans is in no small part because raiding and killing are actually enjoyable, entertaining, status-enhancing pass times among practitioners. And creating markets and property rights, and philosophy and econometrics, is a poor substitute.

Then, perhaps some of us should put our capital stock of violence to better use, if in our restraint, we are disabused by men who simply take advantage of our creation – the market. It would be the optimum use of our asset.

Or those who put their financial capital stock, or political capital stock to such uses, could pay the opportunity cost of restraint, so that we do not have to. And can continue to devote our energies to the proxy of entrepreneurship and company building instead of the more enjoyable and rewarding use of our capital stock of violence.

🙂

Cheers