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maybe not----i would say that the tax rates/"bidness climate" argument assumes but does not account for a major shift in the political framework within which firms understand their economic activity---until the 1970s, that frame was the nation-state, and what was instituted within the nation state as a function of the internal political relations (more social democratic, less social democratic for the most part, in western europe) was simply the price of doing business. within that context, fims were forced (differentially, inperfectly) to take some account of the consequences of their business acitivity at the social level. mechanisms for redistrubutiong wealth were one means for doing that.
so you cannot separate taxes etc from bigger contexts if you want to understand what they are about.
since the 1970s--and accelerating as the spaces that manuel castells talks about as "the space of capital flows" particular to globalizing capitalism have been established---this has changed---firms now can operate without (more or less) regard to nation-states--by which i mean that it is now possible for firms to operate without regard for the social consequences of their actions in any particular setting--because the political terms that shape action have shifted in that direction. (this does not mean that all firms choose to do so, but that the option obviously exists and is just another business strategy)
if you are looking to justify this elimination of social consequences from thinking about capitalism, you might take your own set of economic assumptions as a test case:
the politics that enables firms to act without regard to social consequences is just that, a politics---but for you that level of politics is eliminated entirely from consideration---
first because you somehow internalize the neoclassical separation of the economic from all other forms of social activity. i do not think that seperation is defensable on any level. it is the lingua france of economics departments, but only hold up because it enables people in those departments to advance the illusion of scientific status by developing mathematically based ways of describing the economy as they understand it. if you think about it, the split is both absurd logically and catastrophic politically.
if you position this ideology in the context outlined above, what you are doing is a functioning as a direct mirror of the situation in that now you cannot talk about social consequences either.
second, by fetishizing the individual and remaining suspicions of organization, you argue for total self-disempowerment in the name of a moralized nonunderstanding of the world around you. but i think this follows directly from the previous step. you seem to eliminate history from thinking about history as well.....what i think you are arguing for, wonder, is that social inequalities are the result of nature or god, not people--and that taxes (for example) function as a way for human beings to mess with the divine order of life under capitalism. i have seen quite a number of your posts, and do not think this is a bad distillation of your position---but it is not pretty to look at it as such.
i see the ideological position you outline, wonder and others, as a kind of sustained self-immolation---the effects of your arguments seem to me to be about total political auto-disempowerment--this comments refers not so much to the content of what you say--because your language indicates that you obviously have a different conception of what personal and/or political power would consist in--what it looks to me is happening is that you conflate political power and consumer choice and reduce both your analytic understanding and political thinking to the domain of what is in front of you, to bourgeois "common sense"--which has nothing to do with analysis from the viewpoint i outlined above.
i want to be clear about this: this is not a personal attack on you or anyone else--what it is is an attempt to sketch an analysis of an entire right ideological position from a viewpoint that is outside that position.
this is a series of reason that might explain not only why i saw the bloomberg article about france ridiculous, but also why we find ourselves talking by each other so often.
what do you think?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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