{"id":308,"date":"2006-03-12T10:17:53","date_gmt":"2006-03-12T14:17:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2006\/03\/12\/anarchordia\/"},"modified":"2006-03-12T10:17:53","modified_gmt":"2006-03-12T14:17:53","slug":"anarchordia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2006\/03\/12\/anarchordia\/","title":{"rendered":"anarchordia"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve been running into a bumper crop<\/span> of Marxists recently.  So when I saw an ‘encyclopedia’ page about how society works leading off a section with “It should be clear that the dominant institution of our society is capitalism<\/span><\/a>“, even though the page as a whole is clearly young and hastily written, I felt a familiar rant<\/span> coming on. <\/p>\n

First of all, society doesn’t have “a<\/span>”
\ndominant institution.  And institutions of family, of civil society and
\nthe existence of government, are vastly more pervasive and dominant
\nthan the various religious, economic, and legal institutions. <\/p>\n

Second, I hate to see fundamental innovations get locked into<\/span>
\nearly implementations. “Capitalism” isn’t a single institution. 
\nNeither the set of general philosophies that have used that title, nor
\nthe various implementations, are ideal or even consistent over time. 
\n(That’s true of many high-profile one-word abstractions.)  The writer
\nabove goes on to say ‘capitalism rewards maximizing short-term profit’
\n— no, it doesn’t.  The pursuit and reward of short-term profits is one
\nof those other institutions built into the fabric of modern society.<\/p>\n

Rant over, man, rant over.  Now
\nfor balance I should indulge a rant about the inadequacy of ‘ideal’
\nmarkets, and the complacency of those who feel they are the only
\nframework needed to scale discussions, comparisons, and decision making
\nfrom two neighbors inconversation to a networked billion-person
\nplanet…<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been running into a bumper crop of Marxists recently.  So when I saw an ‘encyclopedia’ page about how society works leading off a section with “It should be clear that the dominant institution of our society is capitalism“, even though the page as a whole is clearly young and hastily written, I felt a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[211],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}