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Wednesday, February 3. 2010

Dalrymple on John Kenneth Galbraith

At City Journal. One quote:



There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen—their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading—he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats. It is as if he has read, and taken to heart, the work of Sinclair Lewis, but never even skimmed the work of Kafka.


Posted by The Barrister in Politics at 12:16 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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Thomas Mann said Kafka was a religious humorist.
#1 rhhardin (Link) on 2010-02-03 12:36 (Reply)
A lot of highly competent people also have strong drives to achieve and to be seen as successful. So do some highly incompetent people. A key difference between Bill Gates' drive to dominate the world and Stalin's drive to dominate the world was this: Bill had to provide something people wanted to buy at a price we were willing to pay. Stalin just had to provide ammunition to his troops.
I'd rather the megalomaniacs were in the private sector where they have to produce something. Since the government megalomaniacs have coercion on their side, I'd like the government's role kept to a minimum.
#2 Geoff Brown on 2010-02-03 12:58 (Reply)
Exactly right, exactly right! And I loved the quotation, too.
#2.1 Texan99 on 2010-02-03 18:47 (Reply)
Ok. Ok. I have had enough of one side bashing on JKG! He did an excellent body of work over the course of his life. He should have been given the first Noble prize awarded in economics, or failing that he was more than qualified to have received one somewhere along the way--his work was no more, nor less flawed than let us say Friedman, or Simon, or Stigler, or Krugman! I wonder why this man was isolated out of the awards--do you suppose there was something else going on?
#3 another one on 2010-02-03 13:35 (Reply)

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