Invisible hand job II

The more that Spot reads Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, the smarter he (Phillips, not Spot) gets. Some of you will remember, boys and girls, that a few weeks ago Spot quoted Phillips on page 226 of his book about regarding the effects of a theocratic chokehold in a nation’s decline. Now, here’s a bit from pages 316 – 7. This is not the only thing Spot is reading, boys and girls, so save your caustic remarks about Spot’s reading speed.

The Invisible Eighteenth-Century Hand in American Twenty-First-Century Strategy

Adam Smith, the worthy eighteenth-century Scottish economist who inclined to the American side in the Revolutionary War and sympathized with colonial complaints about British mercantilism, commanded a very enthusiastic press in the United States through the last quarter of the twentieth century. Ties bearing his embroidered profile were said to have sold far better in Washington than in, say, London or Edinburgh.

For the twenty-first century, however, some diminution of worship may be expected. Smith's vaunted "invisible hand" - the inerrant guidance of the market - has become too fumble-fingered for a growing percentage of doubters, especially advocates of strategic thinking and the need to consider political, economic, and cultural externalities ignored by more than three decades of marketplace orthodoxy. As a side benefit of their great-power analyses, historians such as David Landes, Paul Kennedy, and Jonathan Israel have held forth at some length describing how Smith's market theory and blinders caused him to misjudge or ignore many political, military, competitive, or strategic factors that influenced the rise or decline of the Dutch and British global economies." Luckily, attention is also growing to the inadequacy of pure market theory in explaining developments in the United States.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett, a critic of the proliferation of financial services and speculations in the United States, also poked fun at Smith and his hallowed marketplace. Instead of finding the "invisible hand" in stratagems such as derivatives, he likened such instruments to an invisible foot kicking society in the shins.

Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy pp 316 – 7 (2006)

Of course, this is heretical to the Rt. Rev. Captain Fishsticks and the Church of Social Darwinist Hunter Gatherism. But if we’re really lucky, enough people may become heretics in time to head off international economic oblivion for the US.