Status, Greed, and Power

Good post. Exactly the reason I believe the salaries for representatives should be much lower.

Favorite line from Yglesias: "My personal feeling, the longer I spend in DC and working in the political domain, is that I get better and better at understanding other people’s ideologies." His spiritual forebears of two centuries ago had similarly complacent views regarding the natives.

I'm sympathetic to the distrust of aggregated power you point to in this post. And the connection between CEOs and politicians seems very apt - both private and public concentrations of power are dangerous to liberty. So it's important to discover ways of enabling the people to make policy in ways that keep power well distributed, and that let those who aren't driven primarily by greed to have a voice.

This chapter by Yochai Benkler from the recent publication "New Perspectives on Regulation" has some interesting and provocative ideas on these issues: http://www.tobinproject.org/twobooks/pdf/New_Perspectives_Ch3_Benkler.pdf

Arnold,
I'm not sure your argument in the last two paragraphs is consistent with your argument on your post about "Elite self-perpetuation". Also, I'm not sure to understand what you mean by large-scale politics and large-scale capitalism in the last sentence because I've seen that tendency in many contexts that hardly qualify as "large". I'd appreciate it if you can elaborate further these two points.

I think the the more state power over the economy, then the more dominant become the types that Yglesias frets over. Yet Yglesias and others like him work energetically and tirelessly to expand the domain of those very people. The truth is closer to this: the ground that grows morally cretinous power aggrandizers is plowed and fertilized by the likes of Yglesias.

The commentary makes a great deal of sense because people cannot help being human beings. The fact that Matt Yglesias expects something else shows that he does not understand reality very well.

Stanford's Robert Sapolsky documented a case where a troop of baboons came across a human dump, and the alpha males hogged all the food. Unfortunately for them, it was contaminated, and killed them all. The social dynamics of the troop changed markedly, and permanently: nobody put up with alpha-male crap anymore, and males who joined the troop were socialized not to act like alpha males.

I'm not advocating a huge banquet for CEOs and Congressmen at which the meat (or maybe the booze) is poisoned, but it's a thought.