This essay was written in response to the post Cognitive Mercantilism
First of all, you’re a fucking idiot.
Predominantly because wealth is fundamentally scarce and finite. It does consist exclusively of the material – oh snap – wealth of the Earth. The ridiculous imaginings of you and Marc Andreessen, that infinite wealth exists in the ether of the Internet, is wholly captured in the characterization of that wealth, that it is virtual.
Now I am not saying that a whole bunch of people haven’t gotten “wealthy”; they have. All of us in the OECD are. But absolutely nothing has changed in the way that wealth is acquired.
Today, there are more people in the world than when Adam Smith penned his famous treatise. This, and only this, accounts for the wealth you and I enjoy.
Most of those people exist in the same material conditions as their peers did at the peak of the “mercantilist” period. Their lives, materially, are maybe 20 percent better than the poor of the 1700s. That other 80 percent of economic activity they engage in – i.e. transforming the Earth’s material wealth into commodities via their labor – goes to you and me. How the fuck do you think Roman Abramovich got the Eclipse? (yes, I know how you think he did (giant fucking eye roll))
Secondly, Jesus, you are a pompous ass. Not only that, you are selectively ignorant. “Aggregate demand, especially demand from the poor, was barely recognized as a significant economic force”??? Gee, sounds like the exact fucking argument I just made above.
“The poor”. “The elite”. How about “people” and “labor farming usury fuckheads”? Yeah, I read Atlas Shrugged. Yes, there are singular individuals whose painstaking efforts advance the material condition of vast swaths of the population. Their names are Frederick Banting and Tim Berners-Lee. You’ll note, they don’t have yachts.
Third, you are a historical revisionist. The result of enclosure was, precisely, a “world full of useless mouths”. The Vagrancy Acts of 1547 and 1824 were established for this very reason. That “elites”, which include “ordinary Britons” and you and I today, funneled that untapped labor into an apparatus for their own enrichment is not some gift of capitalism to the world. It is an extension of the brutality that has constituted enslavement since the dawn of time.
The application of the term “virtuous” to any of this is a glaring window into the sanctimonious superiority complex of a cohort who sees the inequity between those who hold title over material wealth and those who do not as the “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid”.
Also, man, no one is “surprised to learn (for instance) that people in third-world slums are often willing to cut back on spending on food in order to buy a TV”. They are surprised that you would defend a system that would require them to.
Lastly, most people were not “liberated” from the necessity of farming. The underlying material resources necessary for farming were taken from them, at the point of a spear, forcing them into the paradigm of wage labor and destroying a cornucopia of cultural life in the process, thereby constraining the entire world’s population to a singular cultural existence.
In other words: eat a dick.