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My original point is that capitalism has to operate on equal footing with the state if it is to thrive, otherwise it will be subsumed into the state at the conv

My original point is that capitalism has to operate on equal footing with the state if it is to thrive, otherwise it will be subsumed into the state at the convenience of said state. > So by virtue of being English/Dutch descended they have a better system. Sure. Systems persist through generations. You can still see remnants of the old French colonial government in Louisiana to this day. I don't understand why this should be a controversial statement. The British attitude towards commerce evolved over hundreds of years, and their colonies inherited it. > How is France "uniquely vulnerable to fascism? A poor choice of words, sorry. They're 'particularly vulnerable', not 'uniquely vulnerable'. > How do you think that having a response to monopolies enshrined in law makes it a "bedrock feature" of our society when the US has seemingly abandoned any serious enforcement of antitrust law? When it comes to very very large institutions with difficult-to-check amounts of power, then ordinary law fails to provide for one side. The antitrust regime in particular was fighting against Standard Oil, a conglomerate that deployed the sharpest legal minds in existence at that time to circumvent federal regulation. It was checked by Teddy Roosevelt, who led the charge to disrupt their operations so they could be brought back under state supervision. Where law fails, individuals and/or mobs take over. The ability of those corrective agents to actually check power is the operative concept here. As another example, the Magna Carta was rammed down the throat of the British Crown by the aristocracy, which was tired of seeing their concerns meddled with by the Crown for no good reason they could see. A full-on war had to be fought between the baronies and the Crown before the Carta could be accepted as a legitimate check on authority. When making a power play, you're changing who gets to write the rules. The mark of a functioning society is when royals, elites and commoners can square off against each other without igniting a war. If they can't do that, then one swallows the other, usually the state consuming private enterprise. Only robust national institutions can maintain the balance of power between entities. After the Carta was passed, the actual text of the charter quickly became obsolete, but the ideas that it represented, that the Crown cannot just do whatever it wants, became enshrined in the minds of the British. Without this innovation, private enterprise cannot flourish, except in a trickle-down fashion from the state. It's not really private anymore, it's 'at the pleasure of the state.' My argument is that only the Anglosphere and the Dutch managed to evolve this institutions throughout history, in slightly different ways, and that all other countries try to ape the institutions, and fail to create robust ones. Because it goes farther than merely having a judiciary and constitution. The public themselves has to buy into the system, which is what makes the French public so scary to its lawmakers.

lovich 9y ago
I might be able to agree with your argument if your most recent example, Teddy Roosevelt, was not alive 4-5 generations ago for me. The magna Carta for instance was so far back that their language is extinct, they have the barest of influence on the modern world. The anglosphere and the Dutch may have evolved institutions that kept a balance between the state and private industry but that balance only existed for a short time. It certainly didn't exist between the civil war and world war 2 in the US as we swiftly changed between robber barons and the new deal. It seemed like they more in between 1945 and the oil crisis of the 1970s, but since then the companies have taken more control every year
- vinceguidry 9y ago
  Well I wouldn't call Latin extinct, just dead. People still learn and speak it today, it's absolutely fascinating. I challenge you to learn more about history. Learn about the history of corporations and how they grew out of colonial enterprises. Learn about Standard Oil and what private enterprise looked like before and after them. There are a lot of devils in those details. When you study enough of it, you can sense a smooth, continuous line of social and legal innovations that threads through all of recorded history, thousands of years. The Civil War that you mentioned settled many pressing issues regarding the ability of states to assert their will against the nation. World War 2 enshrined international agreements and institutions as vitally important for averting war. It also thrust women into economic importance. All of these events created bedrock principles for the new social order to coalesce around. Once they're set, they're set. Other countries want them and so they do the best they can to try to copy them. But they're never going to work as well as in the countries that they arose in. Nobody does tributary taxation like the Russians. Nobody can build a single-party state quite like the Chinese, with 6.3% of the entire population in the CCP.

lovich 9y ago

I might be able to agree with your argument if your most recent example, Teddy Roosevelt, was not alive 4-5 generations ago for me. The magna Carta for instance was so far back that their language is extinct, they have the barest of influence on the modern world. The anglosphere and the Dutch may have evolved institutions that kept a balance between the state and private industry but that balance only existed for a short time. It certainly didn't exist between the civil war and world war 2 in the US as we swiftly changed between robber barons and the new deal. It seemed like they more in between 1945 and the oil crisis of the 1970s, but since then the companies have taken more control every year

vinceguidry 9y ago
Well I wouldn't call Latin extinct, just dead. People still learn and speak it today, it's absolutely fascinating. I challenge you to learn more about history. Learn about the history of corporations and how they grew out of colonial enterprises. Learn about Standard Oil and what private enterprise looked like before and after them. There are a lot of devils in those details. When you study enough of it, you can sense a smooth, continuous line of social and legal innovations that threads through all of recorded history, thousands of years. The Civil War that you mentioned settled many pressing issues regarding the ability of states to assert their will against the nation. World War 2 enshrined international agreements and institutions as vitally important for averting war. It also thrust women into economic importance. All of these events created bedrock principles for the new social order to coalesce around. Once they're set, they're set. Other countries want them and so they do the best they can to try to copy them. But they're never going to work as well as in the countries that they arose in. Nobody does tributary taxation like the Russians. Nobody can build a single-party state quite like the Chinese, with 6.3% of the entire population in the CCP.