The Administrative state



The plutocrats on the right want to dismantle the administrative state, so they say. Of course, their wealth derives directly from the fiction of private property and an administrative state is required to enforce that fiction. Their wealth is monetized in currency, which is another fiction that the administrative state holds a monopoly on. 

The Bolsheviks destroyed the ruble through hyperinflation: they printed money at an unprecedented rate, causing the supply of paper money to grow exponentially, and they issued their own paper currencies called sovznaki, or Soviet tokens, to try to deny that they couldn't do away with money. The result was that the ruble's value was reduced to 1/20,000th of its 1917 value. 

There’s a huge difference between the agrarian economy of 1917 Russia and 2024 America, but abolishing the Administrative state that underpins the American economy will cause extensive and lasting harm for the majority of Americans. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Donald Trump and the rest of the plutocrats believe they’ll be fine. I’m not so confident. I suspect they’ve been seduced by what Alfred North Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind

Hosea 8:7

 

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