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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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But national sovereigns don't internalize the costs of their mistakes or reap the rewards of their enterprise like private proprietors do.

Really? I can think of more cases where sovereign nation-states do "internalize the costs of their mistakes or reap the rewards of their enterprise like private proprietors do" than I can think of cases where they don't, unless by "sovereigns" you are referring to tinpot dictators who "externalize" failures by blaming their failures on foreign actors. Poor social policy can f-- up demographics, which weakens the state. Poor farming policy leads to crop failure. Poor educational policy leads to low labor productivity. Failure to safeguard the borders leads to loss of territory. Failure to balance the books leads to national default, usually by way of hyperinflation (with a singular exception in the USD, which is supported by its use in international trade). Environmental pollution can be externalized, but it's much easier for an individual land proprietor to externalize pollution. Honestly, I'm failing to see how nations are different here.

I think that you're confusing nation-states with national sovereigns. National sovereigns are the people who rule a nation-state. Nation-states are not agents in their own right and so cannot internalize costs at all. There is, at best, an extremely attenuated connection between the events that you're describing and the fortunes of the people who rule the countries that they happen to, as history amply shows.

Ok. If you are specifically talking about the people who rule nations, I can agree with you that cost externalization is rampant on the basis of the many nations that have been financially ruined by their wealth-extracting elites.

However, there are whole categories of private proprietors whose business models are explicitly extractive. Notice how most of the pre-Covid profit of large corporations was due to "financialization," which translates to roughly "taking out low-interest loans on our assets, guaranteeing short-term profits." You may also notice how most private equity deals are structured to merely externalize long-term costs onto subsidiaries (and other investors) while extracting short-term profits, or how whole sectors of the economy will lobby for special protection. What is a farm/CHIPS subsidy, if not externalizing the cost of business?

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