Your ode to Pound and Cantos brings back the good old days when I too pored over the cryptic sayings of the madman of St. Elizabeth's. While I agree with your estimation of his artistic pathos and sensibility, Pound was a barbarian when it came to politics. But I believe you have understood his economics better than I, and I would be hard-pressed to summarize his economic yawps with such elan as you.
Perhaps the shade of old Pound was moving about when I asked my question about paying people back for their tax investments. The sight of all that blood in Wesley Snipes' _Blade_ which I saw with my son last night may have awakened the old bard's fury in my imagination. Yet, I am not sure that I agree that what I was aksing was tantamount to government paying back the taxpayers.
To be quite honest, I was merely trying to turn the tables around on those who make so much noise about taxes and the government's role in business. If anything, the main point I want to understand is that the rightists talk about making government efficient and accountable to business criteria, but when the giveaways to business are added up they dwarf the so-called handouts to safety net programs.
Now I am not a Marxist ideologue of any sort. I understand Marx more in terms of Simone Weil's characterization of him as an anatomist of oppression, moreso than a systematician to be followed at all costs. I do not even know the "textbook" Marxist answer to my question.
I would like, however, to find a way to counter the notion that government should act like a business, talk like a business and dress like a business. Marx's criteria of efficiency in the name of the proletariat heads in the right direction. Efficiency with a human face. In trying to square that with "government for the people, by the people and of the people," I find myself left pondering the indecipherable, however.
I am still left with the feeling that the best government is no government. That's the anarcho-syndicalist side of me I guess. Since Simone Weil is a kind of hero for me, perhaps one could even think of it as my feminine side. :-)
chuck miller
Carrol Cox wrote:
> bautiste at uswest.net wrote:
> >
> > Has anyone ever tried to pass legislation to pay the taxpayer's back on their
> > investment in high-tech R&D?
> >
> > chuck miller
>
> Chuck, for nearly 200 years there has been a sort of mini-industry of
> printing the books written by self-declared and usually self-taught
> geniuses, the core content of each being a "New and Original Idea for
> Keeping Capitalism While Eliminating All Its Bad Effects." I spent a
> good deal of time over about 6 or 7 years more or less mastering a very
> great but very nasty literary work which incorporates a good deal of
> that mini-industry, *The Cantos* of Ezra Pound. He arrived at the
> magnificent conclusion (in some ways not so crazy as it looks, but
> pretty crazy) that the logical manifestation of Jeffersonian ideas in
> the 20th century was the Fascism of Benito Mussolini. I mention Pound
> specifically because Pound and the "economists" he learned from (Gesell
> and Douglas) shared a similar but broader idea: that government as a
> whole could pay a dividend to its citizens. They worked the idea out
> very carefully and brilliantly.
>
> I don't regret my time spent on Pound, because reading the *Cantos*
> directs the mind down marvellous side tracks and to caches of
> fascinating information, and his control of the cadences of the English
> language is unsurpassed. More important was it gave me what I believe is
> a very healthy suspicion of "originality," which except in very rare
> cases is a pseudo-originality, and more often than not a vicious one.
> Real originality (of which Marx was one of the supreme examples) tends
> to claim for itself only two or three very sharply defined perceptions
> encased in a deep understanding of the enmeshment of those perceptions
> in an immense mountain range of ideas and perceptions of reality which
> are *not* original to the thinker. This tends to be true even in
> artistic realms -- music, painting, drama.
>
> Carrol
-- http://www.users.uswest.net/~bautiste/index.htm