Our thanks to
the folks at the Geopolitica web site
for posting this essay of ours. It
begins,
A book thought lost
for good that Prof John Crowe Ransom, a major figure in Southern literature in
the 20th century, wrote in 1932 has appeared in 2017 in print:
Land! The Case for an Agrarian Economy (Jason Peters, edr., Notre
Dame, Ind.: U of Notre Dame Press, 2017).
While perhaps not his
greatest work, it is timely in that Southerners and the wider world are still
being ravaged by the economic illness that is capitalism, namely, periods of
great economic growth followed by periods of great economic decline - the boom
and bust cycle.
One of the great
strengths of Mr Ransom’s book is that he is able to lay his finger on one of
the main problems with capitalism:
‘ . . . Evidently
capital longs solely to earn income, and finds a thousand handsome ways to
gratify this longing. . . . The basic and incessant impulse of capital is
reproduction.
‘The fateful thing
about this impulse is a property which capital shares with guinea pigs and tame
rabbits: it breeds fast. It knows no technique of birth
control. It breeds and breeds until, periodically, there has come
definitely too much capital into existence.
‘ . . . The business
cycle may well be regarded as the consequence of the proclivities of capital for
rapid breeding. In this cycle we may perhaps distinguish three general
stages: (1) Large income from capital and large fresh capitalization out
of income; (2) a definite overcapitalization, overproduction, stagnation of
business; (3) shrinkage of capital through bankruptcy and liquidation, and a
reorganization that amounts to a decapitalization’ (pgs. 35-6).
. . .
The rest is
here for those who would like to read it:
https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/introduction-southern-agrarian-economic-thought
--
Holy
Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð!
Anathema
to the Union!
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