Current Events > "The Market Police," or what globalism is really all about

(+) Yeah! (+)

This is a lengthy book review, but it touches on ideas that I haven't seen so succinctly and well put elsewhere. Only copy/pasting some small excerpts here:
http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/j-w-mason-market-police

In the early twentieth century, there were many people who saw popular sovereignty as a problem to be solved. In a world where dynastic rule had been swept offstage, formal democracy might be unavoidable; and elections served an important role in channeling the demands that might otherwise be expressed through the right to the street. But the idea that the people, acting through their political representatives, were the highest authority and entitled to rewrite law, property rights, and contracts in the public interestthis was unacceptable. One way or another, government by the people had to be reined in.

Mises writings from a century ago often sound as if they belong in speeches by modern European conservatives such as German Bundestag President Wolfgang Schuble. The welfare state is unaffordable, Mises says; workers excessive wage demands have rendered them unemployable, governments uncontrolled spending will be punished by financial markets, and English and German workers may have to descend to the lowly standard of life of the Hindus and the [I think this word is a slur?] to compete with them.
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One of Slobodians main arguments is that neoliberals were not market ideologues in the sense of believing that private property and free trade were natural human relations, and that the role of the state was simply to get out of the way. This may have been the view of earlier liberals, but what distinguished ... the project of neoliberalism was that defending the world economy had to be ... a proactive project.

A strong state was needed to beat back the attacks of the re-distributors. An interesting question not addressed in the book is to what extent this need was really new. Historians of the earlier development of capitalism, such as Sven Beckert in his magnificent Empire of Cotton (2014), have emphasized the immense machinery of state violence and coercion that had to be employed to establish the rule of contract and property in the first place.
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One of Slobodians great insights is that the neoliberal program was not simply a move in the distributional fight, but rather about establishing a social order in which distribution was not a political question at all. For money and markets to be the central organizing principle of society, they have to appear naturalbeyond the reach of politics.
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Property and its privileges are only safe in a world where the rule of money is accepted as objective, inevitable, and outside the scope of collective decision-making. The problem is that the concrete demands of statecraft often require governments to control economic outcomes, depriving them their aura of objective fact. When enemy forces are massed on the border or unemployed workers are rioting in the streets, no government that wants to remain in power can accept economic outcomes as facts beyond their control, like the weather.
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The goal wasnt so much any particular economic outcome so much as a world in which ordinary people and policymakers experienced economic outcomes, whatever they were, as beyond human control.
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Globalism in this story is not only, or even primarily, an extension of contacts between people, trade, production. Rather, it is the creation of a set of property rights that, precisely because they span multiple sovereignties, cannot be touched by one government without inviting conflict with another.
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State power is needed to enforce market relations and property rights, but when it rests on democratic politics, it can easily turn into a vehicle for a broader program of economic planning. So the site of power must be anonymized, hidden from politicsas in the opaque jurisdictional mazes of Europe.

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Bump. I found this informative
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I enjoyed the read but I'm not entirely sure I interpreted it right.

Specifically:

"One of Slobodians great insights is that the neoliberal program was not simply a move in the distributional fight, but rather about establishing a social order in which distribution was not a political question at all. For money and markets to be the central organizing principle of society, they have to appear naturalbeyond the reach of politics"

mixed with this:

"State power is needed to enforce market relations and property rights, but when it rests on democratic politics, it can easily turn into a vehicle for a broader program of economic planning. So the site of power must be anonymized, hidden from politicsas in the opaque jurisdictional mazes of Europe."

Without politics where would the power needed derive from?

I might be missing a simple answer but it's early and my brains not quite on yet.
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Read the excerpts and will definitely be reading more into this later this evening or this weekend. Thank you for sharing.

Zeeak4444 posted...

Without politics where would the power needed derive from?

I think in those quotes "politics" is being used as shorthand for democracy. Globalization and the need to be "competitive" is treated as a natural truth, beyond human control, and off the ballot. The power to shape the market increasingly lies with unelected financiers and central bankers, whose authority is a sort of technocratic thing.
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bump
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