Mr. Thorstein Veblen famously satirized the plutocratic corruption and folly he observed in America in the early part of the last century. In his work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, he wrote as follows:
�. . . the accredited, worthy form of self-assertion is contest; and useful articles or services obtained by seizure or compulsion, serve as evidence of successful contest. Therefore, by contrast, the obtaining of goods by other methods than seizure comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his best estate . . . . Labor acquires a character of irksomeness by virtue of the indignity imputed to it.�
It was necessary, then, for Mr. Greenspan and his political friends to acquire my work "by seizure or compulsion" so that they could be all be seen in their "best estate."
Here's another Veblen passage:
�From the days of the Greek philosophers to the present, a degree of leisure and exemption from contact with such industrial processes as serve the immediate everyday purposes of human life has ever been recognized by thoughtful men as a prerequisite to a worthy or beautiful, or even a blameless human life.�
To avoid a preachy tone, one can simply laugh at a corrupt system--as Veblen did in his unique manner. Veblen archly described people in the act of being wasteful, pretentious, dishonest, dysfunctional, non-productive, and obstructionist.
That was what he saw as the American economic system.
Unless reformed, though, such a system is likely to collapse. And, taken to extremes, a Veblenistic pattern of behavior may evolve into something tragic rather than comedic. As noted above, there was a decline in the birth rate in 1924--an indication of social malaise. While the U.S. should have had everything going for in that year, something was wrong. The superficial economic numbers continued strong, though, until the collapse, which occurred in 1929, the year of Veblen�s death.
Hard times followed.
Many years later, as baby boomers prepared for retirement, one had the feeling that America was again running on heavily borrowed time.
As a Democrat, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh could have scored points for his party by making an issue of Greenspan�s plagiarism. My computer system retains quite a number of e-mails sent to Bayh�s staff complaining of being plagiarized. And I took the notarized 1981 paper displayed earlier in this article to Bayh�s Indianapolis office to try to show it to them.
There was little interest.
CONTINUE