Garver's Accusations
Polesotechnic League merchants:
make a mockery of government
intrigue
bribe
compel
corrupt
ignore inconvenient laws
make private deals
set up private economic systems
fight private battles
act like barons but with no legal status
treat with whole civilizations
make vassals of worlds
reintroduce "raw" feudalism and capitalism
boast of "freedom" which is nothing but license to sin, gamble and indulge in vice
make large profits by supplying the means of indulgence
pay higher salaries than the state
"...thus getting technicians more skilled and reasoners more glib..." (p. 423)
How does this measure up to what the omniscient narrator had told us when introducing the Polesotechnic League in "Margin of Profit"?
"...through bribery, corruption or sheer despair, [governments] gave up the struggle..."
-Poul Anderson, "Margin of Profit" IN The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2009), pp. 135-173 AT p. 146 -
- to control the League.
"It set its own policies, made its own treaties, established its own bases, fought its own battles..." (ibid.)
This confirms Garver's account but from the opposite perspective. Here, the process is called not raw capitalism or feudalism but "..an exuberant capitalism..." (ibid.) From the perspective presented in the series, the League goes rotten when it cartelizes and we see that happening after Satan's World.
12 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I can make several objections to Garver's complaints. E.g., he gripes about the League acting on an interstellar scale and making treaties with other worlds. But the writ of the Solar Commonwealth only ran in the SOLAR System. It was not an interstellar state. And that was true of most of the other advanced worlds, human and non-human. Acting on the scale it did, I don't see how the League could avoid making such treaties.
And what does Garver want? He seems to favor a centralized, autocratic state of the kind the Commonwealth was becoming in MIRKHEIM. Thanks, no. His solution was worse than the problems he listed.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
The main point that I was after was whether we can agree with Anderson that SATAN'S WORLD shows a society in a bad state and I don't see that we can.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Starting to, yes. But I reject Garver's statist solutions.
Ad astra! Sean
As to cartels, note that while capitalists like it when their -suppliers- compete, none of them like having to compete -themselves-.
They only do it because they have to, and if they can, form collusive groups with their competitors.
Back in the Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie was the most successful entrepreneur in the US steel industry and the one most hated among other steel operator.
One of the reasons for this was his favorite trick of forming cartels in times of high prices, then dropping out of them during recessions and underselling everyone else and buying them out when they went bankrupt.
Carnegie was an obsessive about driving down the cost of production in his own plants and invested nearly every penny of profit in new techniques and better organization. His partners hated the fact that he minimized the distribution of profits, because Carnegie was really competing for market share, rather than to make money.
But even Carnegie got tired of this eventually, and sold out to US Steel, the first billion-dollar industrial corporation. Then he went off to live in a castle in Scotland and dabble in philanthropy.
US Steel had about three-quarters of the market, initially, and distributed a lot more of its profits in dividends than Carnegie had.
The lesson is that if capitalists ran things by themselves, there wouldn't be any competition, only cartels, monopolies and rent-seeking.
Hence it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone the League went the way it did.
Sean,
Sure but that wasn't the point at issue this time.
Paul.
As I understand it, competition moves in the direction of monopolization. After each recession, fewer, bigger companies.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stlring!
Paul: I'm sure Stirling can explain this far better than I can: but the best way, economically speaking, to keep cartels and would be monopolies from choking any economy is for entrepreneurs to come up with new ideas, goods, services, etc., that shakes up everything and forces older companies to either be liquidated or again learn how to be quick footed and nimble. That is exactly what men like Elon Musk and even Jeff Bezos has been doing to the aerospace industry in recent years.
Mr. Stirling: I have read up some what about Andrew Carnegie and some of his rather sharp business practices strikes me as questionable, even if they were legal in his day.
And I think Carnegie's philanthropy during the last 18 years of his life has done more REAL good than most of what usually bungling gov'ts manage to achieve!
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: that's part of the story.
But the bigger companies eventually get wrecked, by a combination of internal decay and exterior competition.
US Steel seemed an all-conquering behemoth for a long time. So did the "Big Three" automakers.
Where are they now? Still there, some of them, but walking much smaller than they once did!
Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who came to the US with $2000 and a suitcase, is the richest man in the world, Tesla is worth more than the top 15 auto companies put together, and SpaceX has revolutionized everything concerned with space.
It goes in cycles: growth, consolidation, concentration, crash, fragmentation, growth.
I am really keen to see Musk's space revolution bear fruit.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: I agree. Even my tiny ten shares investment in Tesla has grown enormously in value!
Paul: And I hope so much Musk manages to found his Mars colony!
Ad astra! Sean
Poul would have been surprised and extremely delighted by what's happening with space travel now.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Absolutely! I only wished he could have lived to see it.
Ad astra! Sean
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