[p2p-research] The mystery of capitalism

[Kevin Carson]

On 4/16/10, Ryan <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> The mystery of capitalism
> via Grant McCracken  on 4/15/10

> No, the stories we prefer to tell our children is that capitalism is a dangerous, soulless, relentlessly exploitative exercise. Indeed, this story is so preferred as our received wisdom, that it is exceedingly rare to here anyone recite Adam Smith’s magical insight, that good things can and do come from people pursuing their own, sometimes narrow, objectives.
>

Speaking of "ideological fixtures," how about the idea that what Adam
Smith described has anything at all to do with the corporate
capitalism we know?

> The anti-capitalism view is an ideological fixture of our education systems at every level, from grade to graduate school.  We could call it orthodoxy if it were not so much like boilerplate.  It’s not so much argued as assumed.
>

My own anti-capitalism view entails judging corporate capitalism
according to the principles of Adam Smith.  To make the corporate
capitalism dominating the global economy today into a "story" of Adam
Smith's butcher and baker, is like Stalin making the bureaucratic
oligarchy of the USSR into a "story" of Marx's "associated producers."

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html