#friedrich list

[thatswhywelovegermany]

Jedes Volk und fast jedes Zeitalter eines Volkes hat einen veränderten Zustand der Unfreiheit und der Freiheit, und hat dann auch einen anderen Begriff und selbst ein anderes Ideal der Freiheit.

Every people and almost every age of a people has a different state of bondage and freedom, and then also has a different concept and even a different ideal of freedom.

Friedrich List (1789 – 1846), German economic theorist, entrepreneur, diplomat, and railway pioneer

[yemu1102]

A Meme for Students(like me...)

I made this meme because in my nation their last name are translated into a same word...

*Nagging* I feel depressed for Liszt's etudes and List's studies...and one of my friends (whose major is medicine) suggested me add Sir Lister.

So here it is.

[scholarofgloom]

[johnjankovic1]

Visit Original Link

A Cambrian Explosion: Friedrich List versus Adam Smith

God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train! Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard, 1987

By the twilight of the 19th century no other industry parlayed Washington’s protectionism into a triumph of scale more so than the steel industry. In the wake of a ready market immune to uncertainty, predicated upon the demand for rails, ironworks were poised to mount mass production bereft of any undue fear of idle capacity. Owners felt bullish about expansion and innovation within the parameters of knowing their enterprise would be fully backed by government. Herein a universal theme of incentives can be gleaned in America’s industrialization: the canonical role of government was to reduce risk for business mavericks to invent in their sandbox unfettered by the spectre of loss or regulation until their niche industry became a national one. A heavy hand thus created a domestic market amiable to downstream development under the auspices of government. Provide the fertile ground and all sorts of flora will flower. Heavy industries were then beholden to the paternalism of policymakers. The railroad with its many protections and privileges epitomized a laboratory for industrial expansion. Nearly all of iron and steel consumption fed these locomotives and their grids (Swank 1892:426). The correlation therefore between railroads and industrialization was not at all casual but causal: by the end of century homemade metal blanketed the nation.

The genius of the strategy lay uniquely in the marriage of subsidies and tariffs. The idea was to create a garden and corral it behind disincentives for imports to keep foreign producers at bay. Washington would be the gatekeeper. Aversion to competition from European producers long troubled lawmakers in the post-Revolution period after the War of Independence in 1783. At the crux of this unease was how established manufacturers threatened domestic industries with cheaper capital and consumer goods which would be anathema to industrial growth at home. The corporate welfare of shielding import-competing businesses against such predations was nothing less than an existential matter. Over a longer time horizon the short-term sacrifice of paying a premium for domestic goods would yield long-term gains as smaller companies scaled up their businesses with a pro tanto fall in prices. Economist Friedrich List (1841) in his seminal treatise denominated this phenomenon of dirigisme the ‘infant industry’ theory. Insulate a fledgling company and in less than a generation it will be the envy of global markets. Such a captive market allowed America’s manufacturers to surpass English cities like Birmingham and Sheffield when they were inoculated against the winds of competition from abroad.

List’s ‘infant industry’ theory was an indictment against the universalism of free trade fathered by Economist Adam Smith (1776). In the context of the modus vivendi after the War of 1812, America adhered to the tenets of the former in its bid to rival the Goliaths of European industry because it could scarcely compete otherwise. The economic saga is quite lively. Upon the normalization of trade relations anew Britain sought to recapture its prewar marketshare by dumping its glut of goods which were denied during the internecine conflict. Domestic producers soon reeled from the loss of their foothold in the marketplace. So began the age of tariffs at the behest of homegrown industry. A whole battery of duties followed with each act more intense than the last: the Tariff of 1816; the Tariff of 1824; the Tariff of 1828 or colloquially dubbed the ‘Tariff of Abominations’; the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1864; the McKinley Tariff of 1890; the Dingley Tariff of 1897. Prohibitive levies as high as 100 percent on manufactures defied Atlanticism. Ironically enough as List’s economic nationalism was made flesh in Washington, London sued for Smith’s thesis of free trade instead by its repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. One nation repudiated classical orthodoxy whilst the other embraced it — but only after having wed itself to the same statism which enriched it for so long.

America vindicated List’s doctrine with its industrial catch-up to Britain at meteoric speed. Business interests, well ensconced behind tariff walls, fought well to capture scale economies and technologies that were once elusive in the absence of high levies and infrastructure like railroads. A sheltered market and superior logistics were prerequisites for businesses to move up the value chain whose result shattered the illusion of English invincibility in industry (Irwin 2017). It is not reductive to argue America’s ascendency was monocausal: industrial policy was the thrust behind most if not all of it. In the end America would no longer be marginalized as the feedstock of empire but instead become one. Suddenly a Cambrian explosion manifested. Sourced in the crucible of economic nationalism sprouted the pervasive use of machines from the capital deepening of businesses to raise productivity: the McCormick mechanical reaper and John Deere ploughs became mainstays on farms; the McKay sewing machine was embraced in the bosom of textiles; foundries imported Britain’s Bessemer process to smelt iron into steel; Samuel Morse standardized telegraphy for instant communication with his eponymous code disseminating news in seconds; Gustavus Swift’s refrigerated railcars created a national market for perishables. These marvels indelibly altered the DNA of American capitalism.

Like any agrarian society America once languished at a subsistence level with a constellation of cottage industries. Local general stores carried limited inventory; artisans fabricated bespoke items in small quantities; blacksmiths forged metal for the utilitarian needs of a community; farmers were by and large landlocked. America was merely a patchwork of niche markets. In time the creative destruction wrought by railroads completely upended this inertia. Sears, Roebuck, and Co. would be established in Chicago’s epicentre of railroads for its mail-order business;  smokestack industries found a renaissance in major cities; centralized commodity exchanges and grain elevators would become synonymous with railroad junctions. Places which were once trading outposts like Chicago, Atlanta and Houston found new life as cradles of business. Disparate regions discovered new identities as the breadbasket, steel belt, or coal country of the nation. Such diversification is the real legacy of railroads which reimagined supply chains by inaugurating just-in-time deliveries. Rivers were constrained by geography. Roads remained at the mercy of inclement weather. Railroads however transcended the banalities of transportation to consolidate a national market into a primus inter pares of production in relation to Europe.

[edrudiger]

Quote for the Day

German-American economist who developed the "National System" of political economy, Friedrich List wrote, “An individual, in promoting his own interest, may injure the public interest; a nation, in promoting the general welfare, may check the interest of a part of its members.” 

[maxksx]

[supergwendy]

Lester B. Pearson – The stark and inescapable fact…

“The stark and inescapable fact is that today we cannot defend our society by war since total war is total destruction, and if war is used as an instrument of policy, eventually we will have total war.” -Lester B. Pearson

from WordPress https://workouthomegym.com/lester-b-pearson-the-stark-and-inescapable-fact/

[kallemax]

Arbeit ohne Privateigentum?

"Es ist eins der größten Missverständnisse, von freier, gesellschaftlicher menschlicher Arbeit, von Arbeit ohne Privateigentum zu sprechen. Die ‘Arbeit’ ist ihrem Wesen nach die unfreie, unmenschliche, ungesellschaftliche, vom Privateigentum bedingte und das Privateigentum schaffende Tätigkeit. Die Aufhebung des Privateigentums wird also erst zu einer Wirklichkeit, wenn sie als Aufhebung der Arbeit gefasst wird." Karl Marx - Über Friedrich List

Für mich heißt das Wort zum Sonntag “Scheiße” und das Wort zum Montag “Mach mal Blau”. Ton Steine Scherben 1972