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2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumHow Sociopathic Capitalism Came to Rule the World
How Sociopathic Capitalism Came to Rule the Worldby John Paul Rollert at the Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/11/sociopathic-capitalism/506240/
"SNIP.............
The rise of renegade capitalisma spirit that ripened in the 60s and 70s before flowering in the greed-is-good decade that followedbreached an uneasy truce that individuals like Adam Smith had struggled to preserve between competition and cooperation, the two forces that sustained, as a moral and practical matter, a dynamic economy. If the generation of Keynes and Young had taken the expediency of the competitive drive for granted, those who followed returned the favor by downplaying cooperation in commercial transactions as an unremarkable act without any secondary effects of moral or social significance.
Such developments have important implications for the remainder of Friedmans trade thesis and its relationship to the Republican nominee: If the possibility of co-ordination through voluntary co-operation is, as Friedman put it, frequently denied, that may be because, under the sentimental sway of renegade capitalism, the transactions Friedman describes too often relish of something unpleasant even when they are voluntary and informed. For anyone who has ever had her immediate circumstances exploited for commercial gainwhether it be a $7 Diet Coke at the airport or an outrageously high-interest payday loana world of ruthless competitors guided by nothing more than blind ambition for profit is hardly a pleasant place. At the same time, when Friedmans stipulations come to be regarded as less an ideal for commercial transactions than simply a lawful limitand how can they seem much more to someone convinced of the moral and practical warrant of self-interest?the provisos voluntary and informed can easily appear mere obstacles to self-advancement that call for clever circumvention.
Donald Trump, a man who has made a career renegotiating agreed-upon terms and exploiting ambiguities in contract language (real as well as imagined), seems the embodiment of such an approach to business. Rather than regard voluntary and informed transactions as a model for commercial exchange, to him, any business deal appears like a small battle in a never-ending war for financial supremacy.
The upshot of such an approach is something dismal and squalid: Vulnerability is targeted, duress exploited, and ignorance thoroughly mined. Nothing about such conduct is especially civil. And while one might nonetheless maintain that, in a world full of such agents, both parties to business transactions still benefit from themand so everyone else more broadly benefits from their doing businesssuch a conclusion will invariably smack of something sterile, scientific, and ultimately specious, for most people certainly wont feel that way.
...............SNIP"
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How Sociopathic Capitalism Came to Rule the World (Original Post)
applegrove
Nov 2016
OP
applegrove
(118,009 posts)1. The GOP has been undoing civilized norms of life for the last 30 years.
Long before Trump came along and pulled down all manner of democratic norms.