What the 2020 Election is all About

To hear the Democrats on the campaign trail you would think that the 2020 election is about Medicare for All, the Green New Deal and seemingly open borders. It is nothing of the sort. The 2020 election is not about remaking America, but rather it is about healing America.

What the next president has to do is to restore the idea of America as the land of the free and the home of the brave, not a witch’s brew of hostile identity groups. It means an America that lives up to E. Pluribus Unum, out of many one. It means forsaking the identity politics of both the Right and the Left to seek common ground. I know that will be a difficult task, but it has to be done.

The election will also be about restoring America’s position in the world where allies once again trust us. Who would ever thought that the U.S. president would have shouting match with Denmark, yet here we are. It also means that if we are going to have a trade dispute with China, we had better do it with allies. I would also note that most of the paragons of the global trading system we benefited from over the past 70 years were Democrats, namely Truman, Kennedy and Clinton. If only one Democratic candidate returned to those roots.

In 1920 after suffering from the disruption of World War I, the influenza epidemic, a rash of labor strikes and a “red scare” under the auspices of a Democratic president, Republican Warren Harding was elected on the slogan of “a return to normalcy.” Now 100 years later the Democratic nominee could do no worse than adopting a similar slogan after dealing with the chaos of Trump’s presidency.

My Amazon Review of Shlomo Avineri's "Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution"

A False Prophet

Hebrew University political scientist Shlomo Avineri has written a sympathetic biography of Karl Marx under the auspices of the Yale University Press’ Jewish Lives series. Although Marx came from a family of Rabbi’s, he was not Jewish. His father converted to enjoy the benefits of post-Napoleonic Prussia.

Instead of portraying Marx like his all too many dogmatic disciples, Avineri’s Marx is not of the one size fits all school. Hence in witnessing the advances in democracy in England and later on the continent his Marx become more open to realizing his working class dreams through the ballot box rather than revolution. Hence he learned from the failures of the 1848 revolutions and contrary to Engels’ later writings, he was critical of the Paris Commune. Further he was very ambivalent about the prospects for revolution in Russia, Indeed aside from 1848-49 Marx never directly participated in revolutionary activity; his role was to be theorist studying the inner workings of the capitalist system.

He rarely discussed Jews and Judaism. Early on in 1844 he associated Judaism with the worship of money in a typical anti-Semitic trope. Nevertheless in 1854 in his dispatches on the Crimean War to the New York Tribune he noted that Jerusalem was majority Jewish. This was 40 years before the establishment of Zionism as a political force.

For someone so focused on the working class Marx never lived among, worked with or studied directly real factory workers. He got his insights from the works of Engels and book learning. In a very real sense he was someone who loved humanity, but didn’t really like individual people; not too different from many liberals today.

What Avineri doesn’t touch on is that fact that in order to equalize society, the state doesn’t wither away, but rather it requires brute dictatorial force to keep people equal. Nevertheless for those readers interested in a short biography of Marx Avineri has offered up a very readable book.    

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/REBLW2QXDDEDG/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Donald Sassoon's "The Anxious Triumph: A Global History of Capitalism 1860-1914"

Global Capitalism 1.0

University of London history professor Donald Sassoon could have written a great book for the lay reader describing the first global epoch of capitalism. Unfortunately he took all of the drama out of one of the most dramatic eras in world economic history. Perhaps I am being too harsh because of my amateur status, but his 768 page book, although loaded with information, is a long and difficult slog.

Sassoon’s book lacks the drama of Marx’s 1848 “Communist Manifesto” where praises how the rising capitalist bourgeoisie was transforming Europe. Where Marx showed excitement Sassoon is plodding. Much later Keynes’s “Economic Consequences…” highlights what was available to England’s pre-war bourgeoisie with the mere dialing of a telephone (no telephones in 1860). It would have been nice if he described the life of the bourgeoisie and the working class of 1860 and compared it to that of 1914. The world changed for better for both classes. It would have helped if Sassoon studied Robert Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth.” Remember that the first global age began with the telegraph and the steamship and ended with the telephone, electric lights and the internal combustion engine, all three invented around 1879. It was those three inventions created under capitalist auspices that changed the world.

For a history of capitalism, very few capitalists are mentioned. I was hoping to learn about the methods and vision of the European and Japanese capitalists who built their societies, but came away disappointed. The author describes the rise of capitalism in a host of countries, but he doesn’t put flesh and bones on it. He seems to be more interested in the political leadership than the rising capitalist class.

He further sets up a straw man by arguing that the neo-liberals of the 1980s harkened back to a capitalist nirvana of the 1860s when government’s role in the economy was small. He rightly states that government played a major role in capitalist development everywhere and practically all neo-liberals knew it. Sassoon favored more government involvement and he appears to be very sympathetic to the German protectionist of the 1840s Friedrich List.

Where Sassoon is good is his discussion on the huge profits Britain generated from the sale of opium to China and that colonialism, especially in Africa, wasn’t all that profitable for Europe. Most trade took place among the more developed countries. He also highlights that much of 19^th century America was built with European capital.

My sense is that only the nerdiest of lay readers will find this book of interest. There is a lot here but it takes time to plow through.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1EG4VG2S3487Z/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of James Grant's "Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian"

The Oracle of Lombard Street

I knew Jim Grant in the late 1980s and early 1990s when he was chronicling the commercial real estate debacle of that era is his eponymous “Grant’s Interest Rate Observer”. Grant, the author of several books, has turned his excellent wordsmithing to write the biography of the mid-19^th Century editor of the “Economist”, Walter Bagehot. During the financial crisis of 150 years later, Bagehot’s “Lombard Street” dictum during a crisis of lending freely at a penalty rate against good collateral was widely quoted by central bankers, most notably by the then Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. According to Grant Bernanke got the lend freely part right, but it was at low rates against less than stellar collateral.

Grant’s Bagehot is very impressive. A polymath country banker who married James Wilson’s daughter, the founder of “The Economist.” On Wilson’s death Bagehot succeeds Wilson as editor. From that post Bagehot wields great influence in Britain’s Liberal Party becoming a key adviser to William Gladstone who would become Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister. Bagehot cut his teeth during the 1866 Overend Gurney bank failure that froze the London money market, then the largest in world. London had three times the deposits of New York and eight times the deposits of Paris. In the teeth of the crisis the Bank of England violated its statutes and intervened in the market to stop the bank run.

In 1873 Bagehot wrote “Lombard Street,” his primer on central banking. Grant is sympathetic to his main critic Bank of England Director Thomson Hankey, who argued that to have the central bank be the lender of last resort you create an environment that large banks are too big to fail. We live with that to this day.

There is far more to Bagehot than central banking. He wrote “The English Constitution” and commented on all sorts of developments including his belief that the South would win the Civil War. Grant has written a worthy biography of this truly eminent Victorian.

The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R38KJVAABISATI/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv