If Jesse Norman wants to be an MP he needs to win lots of votes. Try having those sort of discussions in the pub and you’ll quickly realise that there are none so deaf as those who don’t want to listen.
So he has a choice of pandering to the masses and standing a chance of getting elected or telling them what they want to hear and ending election night in ignominious defeat.
Emil
Arthur Negis: can I have my 3 minutes spent reading that blogpost back please?
Seriously claiming that all we need is more Marxism and unions is not really very constructive. Just some gems…
“Now, here’s the thing. When Friedman advocated profit-maximization as a socially optimal strategy, he did so at a time when firms faced countervailing power. In a pre-globalized era of strong unions, they couldn’t easily maximize profits by paying lousy wages or offering degrading conditions, and they couldn’t so easily dodge taxes.”
You should tell that to our HR dept. it’s not really how they see the world working. Rather they know that if they don’t pay competitive wages they won’t retain staff. Also, someone really needs to convince me that working conditions were better in the 60s than they are today, it is a ridiculous assertion.
“To think legislation is necessary to rein in firms. This is the statist social democratic view.”
err no, it is not the statist social demotratic view. it is the view of almost everyone. the discussion is about how much and what kind of legislation we should have and whether businesses should be required to do more than what the law says. Hell, even Milton Friedman himself argued that we should have legislation and that firms should respect it. The discussion was not about whether they should respect it or not but about whether they should have any “social responsibility” to do more than that. Friedman was incredibly specific on this, e.g. stating:
“In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.” (see e.g. http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/friedman-soc-resp-business.html)
Arthur Negus
Sorry you didn’t get on with CD’s post. He’s often unconventional and contrarian, but in my view he’s by quite some margin the most consistently interesting and technically sound economics blogger.
Emil
Arthur Negus: the man’s a marxist for god’s sake – you can’t be a marxist and be a technically sound economics blogger in the 21st century after all of the empirical tests of marxism.
Philip Scott Thomas
Wait. I thought Jesse Norman was an opera singer. And a woman. And black.
I know MP’s often have jobs on the side, but that one’s a bit of a stretch.
Arthur Negus
Emil – Marxist analysis is often very useful and picks up points that some orthodox approaches miss. I think you’d be surprised by what modern marxist work looks like (eg John Roemer who rejects clearly wrong ideas like the labour theory of value). No school has all the answers.
Pat
When as a ‘young conservative’ I met Jesse, a few years before he was elected, he was meant to be soundly on the right of the party. He was supposed to identify with the predominantly libertarian youth of the party, whose affiliation was loose and who were promptly disowned by DC.
Chris Dillow’s take on this point: http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2013/07/profits-norms-and-power.html
If Jesse Norman wants to be an MP he needs to win lots of votes. Try having those sort of discussions in the pub and you’ll quickly realise that there are none so deaf as those who don’t want to listen.
So he has a choice of pandering to the masses and standing a chance of getting elected or telling them what they want to hear and ending election night in ignominious defeat.
Arthur Negis: can I have my 3 minutes spent reading that blogpost back please?
Seriously claiming that all we need is more Marxism and unions is not really very constructive. Just some gems…
“Now, here’s the thing. When Friedman advocated profit-maximization as a socially optimal strategy, he did so at a time when firms faced countervailing power. In a pre-globalized era of strong unions, they couldn’t easily maximize profits by paying lousy wages or offering degrading conditions, and they couldn’t so easily dodge taxes.”
You should tell that to our HR dept. it’s not really how they see the world working. Rather they know that if they don’t pay competitive wages they won’t retain staff. Also, someone really needs to convince me that working conditions were better in the 60s than they are today, it is a ridiculous assertion.
“To think legislation is necessary to rein in firms. This is the statist social democratic view.”
err no, it is not the statist social demotratic view. it is the view of almost everyone. the discussion is about how much and what kind of legislation we should have and whether businesses should be required to do more than what the law says. Hell, even Milton Friedman himself argued that we should have legislation and that firms should respect it. The discussion was not about whether they should respect it or not but about whether they should have any “social responsibility” to do more than that. Friedman was incredibly specific on this, e.g. stating:
“In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.” (see e.g. http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/friedman-soc-resp-business.html)
Sorry you didn’t get on with CD’s post. He’s often unconventional and contrarian, but in my view he’s by quite some margin the most consistently interesting and technically sound economics blogger.
Arthur Negus: the man’s a marxist for god’s sake – you can’t be a marxist and be a technically sound economics blogger in the 21st century after all of the empirical tests of marxism.
Wait. I thought Jesse Norman was an opera singer. And a woman. And black.
I know MP’s often have jobs on the side, but that one’s a bit of a stretch.
Emil – Marxist analysis is often very useful and picks up points that some orthodox approaches miss. I think you’d be surprised by what modern marxist work looks like (eg John Roemer who rejects clearly wrong ideas like the labour theory of value). No school has all the answers.
When as a ‘young conservative’ I met Jesse, a few years before he was elected, he was meant to be soundly on the right of the party. He was supposed to identify with the predominantly libertarian youth of the party, whose affiliation was loose and who were promptly disowned by DC.