So if this were written in the last century, it would read something like:
> Friedman is a Landau man himself--he lets it be known that he drives one of
> these capacious carriages around the London suburb where he lives, when he's
> not trading Telegraph stocks by telegraph, detailing telegram-boys to East
> India Company Directors, or sipping tea in some far-flung capital. He avers
> that he respects olive trees and aspires to preserve as many as possible but
> that there's no stopping, or even slowing, technological advancement, market
> integration, or British cultural hegemony.
Yet for some reason, Britannia[0] no longer waives the rules. Er, rules the
waves.
Did the British over-commit to investment schemes in developing countries?
The US was a great place for repudiated debt in those days, and there were
other hazards for rentiers -- an extreme example is the transatlantic cable,
which finally opened for business after nearly a million pounds (and over 30
sea sickness inducing atlantic crossings by the chief promoter) in failed
attempts; because the Civil War was being fought, US financial institutions
were preoccupied and most of that capital had to be raised in Britain[1].
> > economic policies to pursue. If your country lacks a
> > capitalist-friendly financial structure with a convertible currency,
> > "transparency" of information, and protections for private property,
> > First World investment money will simply go elsewhere.
As of the Civil War, the South would have come out way ahead on Friedman's
globalisation scale.
If you believe that slavery was the cause of the war, then certainly the
peculiar institution demonstrated both the mobility of capital and labor and
the protection for private property[2] necessary in an economy integrated into
global markets. It also demonstrated why low-cost production and
specialization are not necessarily beneficial.
The Republican party must have changed quite a bit since the 1860s. In those
days, it was in favor of protective tariffs, transfer payments, and activist
government. In contrast, the globalised southerners saw this as restraint of
free trade and endangerment of property rights; Georgia's[3] Declaration of
Causes describes the GOP as follows:
>While it attracts to
>itself by its creed the scattered advocates of exploded political
>heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates
>of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of
>waste and corruption in the administration of Government,
>anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose.
In any event, the penultimate paragraph of Mississippi's[4] Declaration of
Causes shows the invisible hand very visible indeed:
> We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth
> four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our
> fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far
> less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.
Friedman would have gotten on well with the 1861 Mississippi State Convention;
he also prefers Smith to Daniel[5]:
> > As the leader
> > of a country, you can choose to conform to international economic
> > norms or you can choose to be poor.
Note that even if if one takes this statement, "IF NOT conforming THEN poor"
to be true, the statement "IF conforming THEN not poor" does not logically
follow.
It may even be true that leaders of countries would be concerned with things
other than international economic norms or wealth. Statesmanship, perhaps?
-Dave
[0] "The sun never sets on the British Empire" is much more poetic than
"globalisation". Of course, even that is to be preferred to "g11N".
[1] Koerner's description has the following gem: (Thoreau/Arnold)
Once again the British Government supported the project - the importance of
quick communications in controlling an empire was evident to everybody.
(Before it failed the old cable had carried an order countermanding troop
movements which had saved a seventh of the cost of the cable.) Public
interest was intense: when Thomson was delayed at his laboratory, the Glasgow
London train would be held until he arrived. (Only Thoreau in America and
Arnold in England felt that rapid communication was not needed until people
had something worthwhile to communicated.)
[2] US Constitution, Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3:
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof,
escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein,
be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim
of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
[3]ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/history/marshall/military/civil_war_usa/C
SA.documents/declare.ga
[4] http://funnelweb.utcc.utk.edu/~hoemann/reasons.html
[5] as does the web as a whole. Compare the search results for {+"invisible
hand" +"smith"} against {+"invisible hand" +"mene"}
I suppose that Belshazzar, having a kingdom in a favorable location for
eurasian trade, must also have been a proponent of incipient globalisation,
and Chaldean cultural hegemony.