There’s an article, written yesterday in Financial Times, pondering over Ségolène Royal, Nicolas Sarkozy and France’s fears of international competition and globalisation. It is part of a long series of irritating articles writing on nothing but giving an impression of general knowledge on world issues.

Let’s take for example, globalisation. The newspaper says about both candidates:

But neither really questioned the dominance of the state not merely as an engine of spending but also as the prime source of regulation and security in the life of French citizens.

as if questioning that is implicitly a must for anybody who wants to run a country.

Who is going to be the prime source of regulation and security if not the state? Some private company? The bloggers? The newspapers? Your own gun? Anybody is working for its own profit one way or another except the state servants (that is, the state). The state is the pragmatic glue of the society, it is the intersection of all the citizens’ paths.

It’s childish to expect that the market will regulate the society as it is childish to expect that the state, without being actively in check by the citizens, would serve them well.

Left unregulated, the market evolves into a small number of dictatorial-state-like monopolies. Left unchecked, the state evolves in a dictatorship of the stupidest over the rest of the society. There has to be a theorem somewhere in mathematics which states this.

Globalisation means this: your saved money migrate in places where they can get more profit to those who manage them. The picture is like this: you get your 2% interest on your savings, while the managers of your money get a lot more if allowed to “globalise” them (that is, to exploit some other economy’s relative disfunctionalities). Globalisation is using the mobility of resources to serve the richest, as usual. But no matter how rich you are, you are still part of a society, and that society needs a state to protect the citizens from guys like you.

Having a powerful state at the core of your society, and keeping it in check continuously, is the ultimate protection against the unlimited capitalism I can think of. The state is the citizen’s servant and has to stay so.

What’s unlimited capitalism? It’s the nightmare where education is a for-profit business, health is a for-profit business, research is a for-profit business and your security is handled by private, for-profit, companies.
For-profit means for-somebody’s-profit : always try to locate who is that specific somebody, and then re-read the phrase containing “for-profit” in it.
Unlimited capitalism is the worst pest I have encountered in my life, and I think that the only fix to it is limiting each and every person’s total wealth to the one needed to live a (statistically) normal life, fix which can only be applied by the state (that collection of servants which must implement the working conventions of your society).

Competition. I will never agree I was born to be part of a competition. History is full of competitions and says every participant wasted his own and his neighbours time with it. The result is more or less the same: a mess.

Competition only has a meaning when resources are not enough to reasonable satisfy everybody. But the humanist approach would be to focus on creating resources, or on consuming them more efficiently or on diminishing the number of the consumers of those resources. So don’t be in a hurry to have children, they will be forced competitors from birth.

And again, competition is competition-against-somebody and competition-for-something. Whenever you read “competition” try to locate the “somebody” and the “something” part. Usually those who propose/sustain the competition are those who estimate they have some advantage over the competitors. Financial Times is an unwitting exception.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 5th, 2007 at 10:05 am and is filed under humanist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can trackback from your own site.