In the October issue of Seiron, Takeshi Nishibe critiques the perverse economic view that treats public goods as sources of market failure.
He exposes the illusions of manifesto politics, rationalism, and predictive governance that undermine social stability and public life.

2016-10-08
It is due to the perversion of economics that regards public goods as a典ical example of bringing about market failure.
What follows is also an excerpt from a serialized essay by Takeshi Nishibe in the October issue of Seiron.
It goes without saying that this is an essay that all Japanese citizens and people around the world must read.

All emphasis in the text other than headings is mine.

Introductory passages omitted.

If one truly cares about social disparities, one must first and foremost pay attention to the stability of market prices.
Only with such stability do long-term (implicit) contracts—especially those concerning employment—become settled, and only then can investment (and savings) plans avoid violent fluctuations.

This should be immediately apparent even from observing the course of marriage as a long-term (implicit) contract, namely from the fact that unless husband and wife strive to remain harmonious, their relationship will turn into a scene of carnage.

In order to guide society toward such stability—or rather, as the foremost condition for the very establishment of markets—it hardly needs arguing how important public activity (rather than public works per se) is.

Specifically, unless people’s income, health, education, and transportation, as well as morality as a spiritual legacy from the past and a vision that enables collective work toward the future, are sound, the system of exchange cannot function properly.

And yet, what joined hands with arguments for correcting disparities was, so to speak, the demonization of public works.

The reason such foolish arguments spread was the perversion of economics that assumes “the market is already established” and then regards public goods as典ical examples of bringing about market failure.

In fact, there are many cases in which “it is only with public works that markets come to be established.”

The Democratic Party merely came to represent such hypocrisy and error, which have been growing ever stronger among postwar Japanese.

Through these hypocrisies and errors, an atmosphere is fabricated that legitimizes the “era of imitation,” which takes new models and new fashions as its guiding principle.

And in order to conceal the fact that this is nothing more than mood, “grandiose forms and quantities”—that is, policies announced in the manner of designing numerical targets, deadlines, and schedules—were proclaimed as manifestos, giving rise to what was called “manifesto politics.”

What was even more troubling, however, was that manifesto politics declared a rationalism that claimed the future could be predicted through “apparently rigorous forms” and “apparently abundant quantities.”

This is nothing other than the essence of Americanism, and global capitalism is sweeping across and destroying the world precisely through this bullshit—the claim that “crises can be predicted.”

As a result of the conservative view (in the style of Michael Oakeshott) that while risk management is possible, crisis can only be addressed through ruling being ignored entirely, such nonsense has come to flourish on a grand scale.

Here, “ruling” means something like the method of collective governance based on practical knowledge rather than technical knowledge.

Because of this, excessive expectations were also placed on the role of IT (information technology).
In their minds, uncertainty consists only of risks that can be probabilistically predicted, and therefore crises—against which probability calculations are useless—are driven out of consideration.

They also fail to understand that it is precisely in response to such crises that HO (human organization), that is, groups and organizations, have been formed and cultures maintained.

To be continued.