Amen.

Alexander Hamilton and Friederich List are further validated each day that passes, not merely by the historical success of their models, which is undeniable, but by the increasingly obvious failure of the Globalized version of Manchester Liberalism that replaced it.

Laissez-Faire Capitalism, like Communism, simply isn’t built for the real world.

This lithium-ion battery nightmare in the main post is another example of profit-mad managers following stupid trends and wrecking manufacturing, and then the cherry on top is that the managers don’t have any appreciation for the beauty of delivering a working product, or the shame of delivering a non-working product. The managers only care about whether the money adds up. The physical realities of pollution, strained transport capacity, and shoddy products are invisible to them.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The insane wastefulness of financialized capitalism literally kills people in multiple ways, some unavoidably, but most avoidably. I used to try to reason with company officers and factory managers, but I seldom got even an iota of reason into the conversations.

A typical scenario of financialized logistics is as follows: Lithium-battery cars are really an experimental project. They are being transported on heavily over-optimized container ships that have been over-optimized in the mad pursuit of short-term profits. And then a single bad wave gets a little bit of water into the lithium and the entire stock catches on fire.