Search This Blog

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Sometimes ...

For all his brilliance, sometimes G.K. Chesterton could be outright childish, in the negative sense, which is an intellectual failure, or even damned foolish, which is a moral failure. The blogger 'Codgitator' approvingly supplies a quote of Chesterton being -- at best -- outright childish, in the negative sense: Or rather a second ...
"Communism is that form of Capitalism in which all workers have an equal wage. Capitalism is that form of Communism in which the organising officials have a very large salary. … Both presuppose property not personal, but Worked from a centre and distributed as wages. There is a third ideal; or rather a second. It is that individuals should own and be free. … The right and essential thing [is] that as many people as possible should have the natural, original forms of sustenance as their own property.

The division of labour has become the division of mind; and means in a new and sinister sense that the right hand does not know what the left hand doeth. In the age of universal education, nobody knows where anything comes from. The process of production has become so indirect, so multitudinous and so anonymous, that to trace anything to its origin is to enter upon a sort of detective story, or the exploration of a concealed crime."

4 comments:

Drew said...

Sort of a dumb thought

Crude said...

How about taking the scalpel to this one and dissecting which parts were the failure? I can guess where you'd draw the lines, but I'd like to see you give a thorough takedown.

Dr. Michael Bauman said...

You're quite right about Chesterton. At times his pithy insights can be profound and arresting. At others, his penchant for epigram and for turns of phrase yield rank silliness. I'm thinking here about his work on heretics, on Chaucer, on economics (esp. distributism), and on Thomas Aquinas, which simply show that sometimes he doesn't know what he's talking about. Nevertheless, I hold his Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man in highest regard.

Gyan said...

It is certainly not silly and in fact truly describes for Modern managerial Capitalism.

Are modern corporations run by owners or by managers?.
Don't managers receive wages?

I have read somewhere that while the stock of Goldman Sachs has gone nowhere, the managers of Goldman Sachs have made billions.
This is what GKC is referring.