, people in the same - 17:34, 14/10/2015

, people in the same trade never get teehtgor, even at social events, without coming up with a scheme to rig prices and cheat the public -- or its equally inherent drive to privatize benefits and dump the costs on the public. Bruce, it's a commonplace of history that political movements and parties turn into their opposites if they survive long enough. Evangelical Protestant Christianity was a radical left wing movement in the 19th century, for example -- William Jennings Bryan, the great populist politician, was also a devout fundamentalist -- and environmental conservation was a right-wing concern until well into the 20th century. Rainbow, you're welcome!Cathy, Seattle also just barely missed being named Duwumps, which I think would have been a better name for it (full disclosure: Seattle is my home town). It didn't quite try to call itself "New York;" the actual name was "New York Alki," that last word being Chinook jargon (the local native trade language) for "in the future;" you indicated how long in the future by stretching out the A, and it was a running joke for many years to call it "New York Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalki." Arthur, any general survey of panics and crashes -- Kindleberger's Manias, Panics and Crashes, Galbraith's A Short History of Financial Euphoria, or Reinhart and Rogoff's recent and very solid It's Different This Time -- ought to give you a good grounding. Peck's, now that is an online handle most people won't get. As for the moai, well, yes. Glenn, it was a bull, Vox in Rama,, and it was against heretics, but had some references to cats in it as well. Phil, that's too funny. Wasn't it James Thurber who used to tell stories about an aunt who insisted that leaving a light bulb out of the socket would let the electricity leak out? Jess, we'll get to both those points. I'm sorry to say that a win by the anti-imperialists would not necessarily have had a better outcome, since the US was far from the only country trying to expand into the vacuum as the British empire faltered. By the time push came to shove in 1940 or thereabouts, the choices basically amounted to Germany, Russia, and the US; the last (and still very substantial) opposition to US empire collapsed then, because it was all too clear what would happen if one of the other two contenders won out. Escape, yes, Say's "Law" is one of those fallacies that keeps being rehashed by economics professors even though the real world doesn't work that way. As for Technocracy, it always made my skin crawl -- trying to run a human society by the rules of engineering is a good recipe for inhuman outcomes -- but in the context of the time, it's understandable that it would have been popular. Thanks for the links!Prack, true enough. I'd also like people who insist that government regulation is always a bad idea to read a chapter of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle right before dinner every night. Karim, that's an excellent question. In a deindustrial society, where concentrations of wealth, energy, and resources are on a much smaller scale than they are today, useful items of the sort you've described will have to be made by craftspeople rather than by factories; they will be a great deal more expensive and less common, but they will very likely exist -- lens grinding used to be done by hand; the philosopher Baruch Spinoza paid the rent by grinding lenses, for example.