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Carlo Federico's MANIFESTO

PART III

20.

 

Unlearn, read, dear friends. I am going to suggest some further reading to you, with the obvious proviso that you are not expected to agree with the authors' ideas, you are even not supposed to like the arguments, just to understand them.

For instance, about fecal capitalism (we are engaged in our debate about Rich and Poor, Haves and Havenots, utopian beliefs about achieving a perfect world, authoritative analyses carried out by the floundering, and capitalism still is to many a central focus of endless discussions until the neo-Paracelsians do not fade out and future centuries' concern about Being will snub our present silly disquietude about Having. But you should never forget, my friends, that all this hot air about Market, wealth redistribution, Marxism and all the accompanying slaughters (carried out in past decades for the good of the people) are probably topics which will be looked upon with puzzled scorn in next centuries. People then will probably wonder why such obvious arguments caused such a mess in this time, as we wonder now why crusades and silly holy wars galore were so central to human life eight centuries ago). About fecal capitalism I would not insist that you go back to Adam Smith, Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill and Joseph Schumpeter (though a bit of Karl Popper probably could do). Just wake up and never stop searching.

You are awake enough to suspect that many a fault ascribed to free market economics perhaps is too often due to poor performance of the operators involved in the process, cronyism, incompetence, even plain graft: Russia' super-chaotic mess, Indonesia's disarray, Japan's banking shambles, Tin Rowland's Lonrho murky endeavours, calamitous decisions or omissions by powerful financial dilettanti and other crumbling realities are to be taken as cogent models of the free-market idea? Is he right, Robert J. Samuelson, who recently wrote on Newsweek, after the Russian fake-capitalism failure, "Much of the world simply doesn't have the values needed for free markets. We pretended otherwise. Now comes the reckoning" - eh? Find out for yourselves. If you want to read some interesting books on the subject, here they are:

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, by David Landes, published by Little & Brown, a book that even that old distrustful idealist chap, Ralph Dahrendorf, finds enlightening. Somehow connected with Diamond's ideas about who is to lead the world further in the 21st century, a very small booklet by Robert Cooper, Post-Modern State and the World Order, published by Demos, seems to me extremely clever.
A last not least book I would like to mention about market-economy is The Commanding Heights, by former Pulitzer-prize winner Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, published by Simon & Schuster, really a deep analysis of Market's [temporary?!] victory over Statism, of the ideas which produced the most important economic revolution in the second half of this century. Some among you might even re-discover Alfred Mueller-Armack and other Ordoliberals of Ludwig Erhard, the people who transformed ramshackle post-war-derelict WestGermany into locomotive of European economic growth.

(20.To be continued)


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