Yes, just the same

"As usual the markets figured all this out long before I did.  The 2.6% yield on 30 year bonds is basically a forecast of future premature tightening by the Fed.  What I don’t understand is how markets can be so damn smart when they are composed on individuals who are individually quite stupid.  I suppose for the same reason that Albert Einstein’s brain was quite smart, despite being composed of neurons that are individually quite stupid."

Significant drawbacks, indeed

Who knew that serfdom was actually an institution of "contract enforcement."

Tracy Denison, "Contract Enforcement in Russian Serf Society," Economic History Review (2012)

This article examines questions about contract enforcement in the absence of formal legal institutions, using archival evidence for one particular rural society in pre-emancipation Russia. The evidence presented indicates that enforcement services provided by the local landlord made it possible for Russians from different socioeconomic and legal strata to engage in a wide variety of contractual transactions. However, this system had significant drawbacks in that the poorest serfs could not afford these services and no serf had recourse beyond his local estate.

Despite the unfortunate wording, there's something to this. It makes sense for lords to provide some "public goods," such as adjudication and enforcement of private agreements among subjects. That's both because its value as a "concession" of sorts is probably above the actual cost of providing it, and because it's preferable to make "investments" to preserve some kind of political monopoly rather than letting people get too independent (or letting some other institution come in and provide the service instead).

misdiagnosis

Jack Goldstone:

Yet enormous and daunting as these problems are, these executives saw them as opportunities – opportunities to gain in reputation, to cultivate future customers and workers, even to save lives by supporting everything from emergency services and health care to augmenting food production and moving food and energy to where they are most needed.   Moreover, each of these outstanding executives already had projects at their companies that were addressing these problems; the real need was to scale them up, sustain them, and make them core elements of their overall corporate strategy.

All of us recognized that these problems were so large, so pervasive, and so woven into the operations of firms that government alone could not solve them; government alone does not have all the resources or the knowledge required to do the job.  Yet everyone also deplored the degree to which business and government have become at loggerheads today.   It is going to take public-private partnerships, as well as corporate initiatives, to develop solutions to these global problems that will be effective, sustainable, and efficient. The current atmosphere of mutual distrust and enmity between business and government has itself become a problem that needs to be resolved for America to move forward.   It is dreadful that the Democratic/Republican partisanship that is paralyzing our government is now paralleled by a government/business partisanship that is a drag on our economy and an obstacle to solving major social problems.

Still, I came away confident that the private sector is up to the challenges.  If these executives represent the future of private initiatives, and continue to have the backing of their boards and CEOs, America will have good reason to say “God Bless the Private Sector.”

Because public/private partnerships work so well. Because the U.S. government has been so willing to go against or without the cooperation of the "private sector." Because "Corporate Social Responsibility executives" aren't kept on the payroll essentially as a PR exercise.

Also: "Historically, America has flourished with limited government because businesses and business leaders have done much more than their European counterparts to support the communities and broader society in which they work." Which is cause, which is effect?

Cf. cynicism masquerading as a political strategy. Though I guess Goldstone isn't even trying to masquerade as anything he's not.

"a utility optimist and a revenue pessimist"

Tyler Cowen attaches that epithet to himself (specifically in the context of a story about Japanese baseball, of all things). The position on capitalism this implies is extremely interesting: it amounts to accepting the unavoidably crisis-prone character of the system, indeed its probable stagnation in the near future, while insisting that this will not be reflected in much concrete harm. In other words, we might be more anxious about our economic situations, we might feel less affluent, but in real terms our standards of living will continue to improve steadily.

That would be nice. I'm not sure it's born out by the experience of the U.S. and Europe in the past 4 years, though Japan is more arguable.

Marginal Revolution in full-on troll mode

Yikes:

If you think that the freedom to quit is without value bear in mind that under feudalism and into the early 19th century in the U.S. and a bit later in Britain employers and even potential employers could prevent workers from quitting and from moving. The freedom to quit was hard won. We should not disparage the liberation brought by a free market in labor.
* * *
A job is an exchange with mutual consent and benefits on both sides of the bargain. The freedom is in the right to exchange not in the price at which the exchange occurs. A worker who is paid for 8 hours of work is not a serf 1/3rd of the day. We all sell our labor and we would all like to sell at a higher price but that does not make any of us serfs. From the minimum wage waiter to the highly-paid sports superstar there is dignity in work freely chosen.

To understand freedom and true coercion let us remember that American workers have the freedom to bargain and exchange with American employers, a freedom that gun, barbed wire and electrified fence deny to many millions of less fortunate workers from around the world.

Yes, feudalism and current immigration policy are bad. Your point? Though, it is worth pointing out that both this post and Cowen's response before really harp on the quantitative trade-off dimension (i.e. that workers bargain for both wage and working conditions). The post they're criticizing takes a much more qualitative approach based on freedoms and rights; it does lead one to wonder whether ceding the quantitative ground (i.e. the position that employment contracts are bargained on a level field) is a good idea. Though it's probably these 2 economists' faults for not recognizing immediately that working conditions are often public goods.