He does not deserve to benefit from the advantages that nature and nurture have together given him. Quite the contrary, he has been lucky and I unfortunate. Bill Gates has vastly more money that I but this does not stem from superior moral merit on his part. People vary widely in wealth and access to the good things in life and these inequalities, theorists such as John Rawls inform us, are undeserved. Professor Sowell has rightly identified a central preoccupation of current moral philosophy. Fortunately, Professor Sowell's principal concern in the book stands sufficiently close to economics for his treatment to be valuable. The bulk of this book addresses other themes, however and our author does not always fare so well. It is always my policy to emphasize an author's strong points. I have devoted space to this topic in order to show Sowell at his best. This would be adding to their economic and social pressures rather than relieving them, if the Marxian theory of excess capital accumulation were correct" (p. "The idea that the non-industrial world offered a safety valve outlet for the `surplus' capital of the industrial world cannot stand up if the industrial nations are investing primarily in each other. The advanced capitalist countries directed the bulk of their foreign investment to other advanced counties. Our author demolishes this farrago with a devastating point. Overproduction, at least for a time, would no longer menace the economy, and capitalist and worker in the developed countries could happily join in exploitation of the backward nations. The harried capitalists could stave off disaster by investing their surpluses abroad. Hobson, discovered an escape from destruction for the Marxist system. Lenin, following the British radical J.A. Marx's predictions were of course belied by the facts, but so trivial a matter did not disturb the faithful. Marx claimed in Das Kapital that workers in the advanced industrial countries would rise in rebellion as the capitalist juggernaut, unable to cope with cycles of depression, reduced them to ever greater misery. In a few brief and brilliant pages, he demolishes Lenin's theory of imperialism. By the time he reaches his account of the origins of World War II, his book becomes useless.īut he is a fine economist. As he strays farther and farther from the area he knows, he loses his footing. He imagines himself a philosopher and an expert on foreign policy as well. Thomas Sowell is an excellent economist, but unfortunately this is not enough for him. Wrestling Reality From Rawls Mises Review 6, No.
0 kommentar(er)
