Equine droppings

The problem wasn’t money. It was making war. Feudal levies were fine for localized raids and sieges. To actually make war you had to pay the troops. Most feudal dues limited time served and how far from home. To get them to go further you need specie. Ditto for mcercenaries and no one had enough troops from their levies, even the kings of England who could offer rich French loot. Money was gold and silver. You could steal the food more often than not [not so in long sieges which is part of why the obsession with fortifications - most times the fortified place only had to hold long enough for the besieging force to starve or disband from lack of pay or get wasted by disease or...].

Now you could steal all the gold and silver from your subjects. Problem was you couldn’t do it often. Once a generation roughly. More frequently would see them hide it better or emigrate with it. Now add that back to Roman times what we now call Europe had a serious balance of payments problem with India and China. Europe didn’t make much of anything those places wanted except specie. So it kept leaking east for spices, silks etc.

Mercantilism amounts to don’t buy abroad anything that must be paid in specie. Sell sumptuary laws to try to stop leakage for abroad what can be sold for specie. Use eastern ‘luxuries’. This gives a monarch the ability to make largescale war, especially foreign offensives.

Fair distinction. I don’t spend a lot of time on Less Wrong and I don’t want to lump everything together.

RationalWiki is a different level of thing and I go there mainly in search of manic rage, and I find it quickly enough.

Less Wrong is an altogether more serious intellectual enterprise.

Still, I have found over the past ten years a sort of superiority complex among those in net-based movements for “rationality”, whether or not also identifying as libertarians, centrists, technocrats or whatever. The characteristic features for me include taking one’s own moral axioms for granted, or not recognizing them as such. We all do this, and certainly all can do it, but most of the time we are conditioned by society or by opposition attack to look again.

To take a very broad generalization as an illustration, if I were to accept that nations are effectively all the same or should be, and their sole purpose is to serve as administrators of geographic areas and economic engines, and to compete with one another for market share, skilled labour, and comparative advantage, then many other values, preferences, goals and choices will follow. All perfectly rational. But the base assumption is not the only one available and the choice among them is not a rational one but a preferential one.

I am prone to letting that sort of thing colour my attitude, so there’s that.

On mercantilism, I still after a day find Landau-Taylor’s assessment remarkable. I can’t say any historian necessarily explained mercantilism so pithily, or so specifically in terms of revenue-maximization, but I rather assume that many have done the state-building and state power angle and I absorbed that explanation in history classes.

Confronting his piece now it is as though I have just learned that economists have just discovered something obvious to political and social historians for centuries, coming down directly from the times mercantilism was in its glory.

If I ever think of myself as trapped within a conceptual bubble of professional training, core professional/intellectual assumptions, or political values/goals (which I am, and who is not? Mmm. Bubble.) I can at least do two things:

1. Remember that my interlocutor may share none of my values, identifications, or goals, and his choices may be rational within his set of goals or moral assumptions.

2. Remember this cautionary tale.

I’m way past the point of refusing to respect something at all simply because I disagree with large parts of it. But if none of it makes sense… that’s another matter.

Anything that lasted as long as mercantilism had to serve some important function adequately. It’s enlightening to know what the actual function was. The only thing I take at face value is survival. I often hear “reality is what refuses to go away when you stop thinking about it.” I say reality is what refuses to go away.

There’s still more than enough to be said in favour of free trade, but the British already proved it can harden into pretty unhelpful dogma.

As for mercantilism, well, yeah. State building through revenue collection, competition with other governments for military position, and securing the support of powerful political/economic constituencies to support a relatively weak state system are all perfectly rational goals.

Maybe Adam Smith, et al were just the period equivalents of Less Wrong or RationalWiki. Dread thought. But then again, I’ve started to think of Jefferson that way.

Apropos of the latter, I just discovered revolutionary and Jeffersonian statesman Joel Barlow. He sounds like someone who would have been extremely tedious to have a beer with.