Eat any good books lately?

[benji]

Pretty good biography. Spends a surprising amount of time on his parents and their drama involving a decade long divorce situation. (Ford's mom fled his biological father like a month after he was born.) I don't really have any kind of extended critique of this because it was pretty much exactly whatever you would expect. Gerald Ford was a pretty funny guy in private.



Moving onto the next Republican President, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the idea of this beyond the standard support of revisionist histories. I don't really think it executes though. For one thing, other than contemporary complaints it uses pretty much no sources that are critical of Reagan except to the extent that was he was too much of a peacemaker and didn't start wars and show strength enough. Despite the evidence the guy does a poor job building his case as well and he generally sees a conscious intentional strategy where a more reasonable explanation might be a general temperament. Despite Reagan's distaste for details in favor of big picture stuff he mostly insists that Reagan adhered to a detailed strategy and people like George Schulz went along with it when it seems more reasonable to believe Reagan suggested things and Schulz filled out the details. He swerves from this when Reagan runs into problems or opposition and ascribes it all to Reagan being hands off with the details and allowing subordinates to fill them in. That just makes it the typical explanation that only applies in favorable cases. Although the bulk of the book says otherwise, he does at one point admit that Carter started the "Reagan military recovery" and also changed policy on détente before Reagan even ran for President again. He obviously applies extremely over the top value to that military buildup. Generally his portrayal of Reagan made me decide fairly early on I was going to post something along with this but later on he actually referenced it and included the URL in his footnotes so now I have to post it:




Not very good. First of all, it's not really a history of corporations, it's eight brief chapter histories about specific corporations. Second, his definition of corporation, despite being a law professor, is so narrow as to write out most existing corporations in the world. To pick a recent famous example, Twitter is no longer a corporation by his definition. The examples are all less corporations than they are big (mostly publicly traded) businesses. He develops a strange notion that "in the past" corporations were created not for nasty profit but for "achieving the common good" which is pretty interesting stuff considering his first three historical examples are tax farmers and military-imperialists during the Roman Republic, a banking family that seized control of an Italian Republic they drove into the ground alongside their bank and the East India Company. (Despite the the first half of the book, he later claims multinationals didn't exist until after World War II. Later still he claims "start-ups" are an invention of the 21st Century.) Indeed much of the book is about state-granted monopolies not typical business corporations, he completely passes over the Congressional grants to the railroads as if it's some kind of "invisible hand" process to give away millions of acres of land, rights and other capital to monopolies that you then decry for being subsidized monopolies that can't compete but lobbies, bribes and enriches the executives personally. (He even describes the Union Pacific as a "good candidate for monopolization" and that "barons were hell-bent on turning the corporation into a monopoly" ignoring completely the history of its creation he just had outlined. He also didn't do a very good job investigating the ICC which he believes was anti-railroad despite being pushed by the railroads.) This leads of course to what you just know will be coming from your friendly neighborhood anarchist, he conceives of the state as not a corporation but some kind of mystical spiritual force emanating from god-like beings. His "common good" era of corporations was all achieving the goals of the state, namely seizing control of territory with warfare and lots of enslaving non-citizens. He makes much about adoo how corporate charters are granted by the state and laments that just anyone can create one now instead of outlining how it's for "the common good" before being approved as if this isn't just two corporations agreeing to keep out competition. This takes on its greatest form when he goes on for some length about how every corporation's goal is to establish a complete monopoly, something I hadn't considered before about the goals of his employers the corporations of Harvard and Texas A&M, while simply accepting the claim of a corporation that it owns a monopoly, including his desired monopoly on which corporations can exist, simply because it says it does. His conclusion even says that corporations should not be allowed to comment at all on politics as this is not in the interest of the "common good" (so much for Harvard, Texas A&M and the publisher, Hachette, of this book I suppose, Bill says his "common good" is more important than your "greed"), that should only be the domain of a single monopoly corporation with no customers or liabilities which should order all other corporations as to what is the common good they must pursue. Again, as a law professor, he says the NIRA was "ineffective" so Congress passed the Wagner Act, which while it's true it was ineffective (at least for the stated reasons) the real reason for the Wagner Act was because the NIRA was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Lastly, he's really paranoid about Mark Zuckerberg personally (despite, or perhaps because of, Facebook being one of his few non-state-monopoly chapters although he alleges it is an "obvious" monopoly because nobody uses Bing) and I can't support that kind of anti-robot prejudice in 2023.