roachboy

i dont think you can seperate the development of the modern ideology of nation from the formation of the bureaucratic state....which is not to say that the ideology does not have an internal history (like everything else, it comes from somewhere) but this would be a kind of backwriting of features of the ideology into the past rather than something that worked the other way around.

one of the main features that distinguishes the modern state from its predecessaors is the development of budgeting, which relies statistical models for mapping the past onto the future and thereby introducing a level of predictability into the operations of the state--louis 16, for example, did not use budgets--sometimes i wonder if the french revolution would have happened if the finances of the french state of the late 18th century were organized differently. the whole chain of events got started as a function of the crown defaulting on bonds that they floated to pay for the american adventure against the british.

the use of budgets as a way of stabilizing the states relationship to the context it administers is crucial for its development and is also a factor in the type of crisis that you see it sliding gradually into--predictablilty presupposes that the economy is organized within the frame of the nation-state and that policy making can inflect economic activity--which is one mechanism in the more general process of social reproduction/control. once stock began trading internationally and once financial flows developed real-time transnational networks for their movement, and once the organization of production moved outside the frame of nation-states, they began to loose control over the features that had previously enabled them to make their contexts predictable---the outcome of this is a radical increase in uncertainty--which is processed as increased political risk for the state. the whole drive to privatization fits into this pattern, as a response aimed primarily at reducing risk for the state--and by so doing to maintaining themselves (and nationally oriented political organizations more generally) as viable.

if something screws up and the state is involved, the consequences are political.
if something screws up and the private sector is involved, the consequences are not necessarily political.
efficiency, service delivery--not relevant. this is about political self-preservation. the right knows that it will be the first to loose if things head south for nation-states and that heading-south is understood as political. they also know that if the position of the nation-state starts to really change, they will find themselves without an ideological basis for operating at all. and the moderate "left" is in the same boat, just a bit further on in the deterioration process. but the writing is on the wall and the right knows it. whether the folk who subscribe to conservative politics see this as a motive or not seems to me secondary.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

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