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Saturday, May 14, 2011

Koch Is Still A Political Problem

This exchange occasioned by one of the right-wing billionaire Koch brother's effort to buy and control a university's econ department is upgraded and adapted from the Moot:

A Reader points out:
Uber-wealthy amoral scumbags will buy you if you're for sale. One easy way to combat this is to not be for sale. Koch is a scumbag, of course, but FSU seems rather villainous, too. Why don't they just auction off parts of their core curriculum? Think of the money they could get to spend on the football team.


I reply:

But of course, recognizing that non-negligible numbers of people will be corrupt or "for sale" isn't an answer but the point of departure for coming up with solutions. Declaring all parties "villainous" is even worse, it suggests disinterest in the very idea of coming up with political solutions.

If sizable numbers of people weren't prone to error, deception, corruption, aggression, abuse then so-called "market solutions" would actually be adequate to social and political problems. Since all people are prone to these problems in some measure (even, sometimes especially, people who strive not to be) one needs norms, law, regulation, rights, incentives/architecture, separation of powers, subsidiarity, yoking taxation to representation, periodic free election, general education, redistributive welfare entitlements, firewalls against regulatory capture, and so on.

The alternative to embracing this actually political point of departure is usually reactionary: it will amount either to
some facile pre-political variation on "spontaneism," like market fundamentalism or one of the left anarchisms,

or it will amount to
an authoritarian moralism, some construal of "we" over "they," "kill all the scumbugs."

Given your stated prejudices about the frailties of amoral uber-wealthy people and universities that prioritize football over, say, their humanities curriculum, I would no doubt find your construal of "we" as sympathetic as not, it sounds like we see things comparably.

But of course politics is not morals, come what may. And Universities, whatever their gaucheries and injustices, are one of the few remaining institutional spaces that resist American anti-intellectualism and (ever less and less) resist market imperatives. They are worth saving. So all the actual problems that beset us remain.

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