Why Jews are good at money

10 posts

Welund
How many farmers do you know today? That's similar to how many farming Jews there were 1000 years ago. Jews had a worldwide trading network by that time and were known as far as China as merchants. These people took up niche trading roles through the rise of the so-called Magian or Arabian culture, prior and during the which they probably picked up all kinds of long-developed and hyperspecialized merchant types from the Fertile Crescent cultures, some of the Italians and other Europeans. Every civilization is full of merchant types, some likely even more specialized than others, and the Jews seem to be triply or even quadruply compounded with merchant genes, esp. as you got to bottlenecked European Jewish populations.

Related thread:

https://salo-forum.com/index.php?th...gnomy-of-the-arabian-peoples.3919/#post-30496
Thesokorus
Most Israeli high tech is either the result of corporate espionage (pharma) or massive subsidies (semiconductors). For example, Israel paid for almost the entire infrastructure for Intel and also gives them tax breaks. All of which comes from US foreign aid...
Thesokorus
100% agree. But is not Capitalism the remaking of the world in the Jewish image? We've been talking about the Guild System in this thread, is that not an internally consistent alternative? And one where there is no extraction of "value" via superior information or willingness to violate social taboos?
Dogmatic Tower
It's possible to make a distinction between Henry Ford and Goldman Sachs. That which realizes a profit by adding value through labor, so what you sell is worth more than it cost you to make it ... versus rent-seeking, including rent-seeking off of money itself: i.e. interest. Rent seeking is fundamentally unproductive; worse, it means making people pay to produce. One could argue that reform of capitalism short of abolition ought to pay special attention to the almost total separation between those who own things and those who use those things, and thus the way that profit (whether from added value or rent) is taken by the owners rather than by the workers ... as well as what Marx referred to as "alienation": in short, in almost every case, those who produce do not consume what they produce while those who consume do not produce what they consume. But Spengler did dismiss Marxism as "the capitalism of the working class". If anything, Spengler's prescriptions were far more collectivist and authoritarian than Marx's.

Thorstein Veblen (if you want a comprehensive non-Marxist critique of capitalism with an eye towards the social implications) had much to say about how the culture of "business" or "enterprise" - which he consistently opposes to the culture of "production" - is basically a legacy of "barbarian" stages of social development where a society can only consume what nature or other humans have produced. Production is first materially impossible, since the most primitive societies have limited tools, no useful knowledge about how the world works, and being mobile they are more burdened than served by what they could make. When horticulture (versus plow-based agriculture) or animal husbandry appear, production comes to be shunned as the lot of women and children or slaves, while taking by guile and/or force is the "manly" and "noble" way to make a living ... especially if a barbarian society conquers an agricultural society and sets itself up as the ruling class. Capitalist society is essentially farmers and craftsmen - producers - ruled by a superstratum of rustlers and pirates who've traded their horses or ships for offices.

Guilds performed many of the functions of unions, professional associations, investment banks, and regulatory agencies. They determined what qualified you as a "master" of the trade, they served as quality control of products, they regulated labor conditions and pay, they protected the value of skilled labor, they both facilitated the transmission of knowledge and skills within the guild and guarded trade secrets, they suppressed anti-competitive business practices (including undercutting prices), they provided capital in the days before commercial banking, and so on. The key difference is that, in the final analysis, the guild was not [intended to be] a moneymaking enterprise, and from that logically comes every difference between a guild-based economy and a not so much capitalist as corporation-based economy. But once upon a time, corporations operated under very different rules, and the idea that their sole duty was to "maximize shareholder value" would have been seen as antisocial.
Thesokorus
Dogmatic Tower

Great stuff. Yes, I define Capitalism as the rent-seeking you describe. Or as The English Ideology.

As to your historical narrative, I would add a stage. You stop at the Age of The Iliad. After that, we began to see the consolidation of land and Capital into fewer and fewer hands. And once that happened, we begin to see that Capital put to use via loans at profit: usury. This began in Greece and then accelerated to an absurd extent in Rome with first their justly infamous debtor laws and then the creation of massive Latifundia... The pagan world was unabashed full throated Capitalism defined as usury and rent-seeking. The collapse of Rome and the creation of Monasteries and then the Guilds was a temporary break from pagan economics. The Florentines and the Fugger and then the Jews simply began the re-institution of the Pagan order...

Ford was an interesting character, kind of half-woke. He did understand that labor was the source of value and that he needed to pay his workers enough to afford what they actually made (as you mentioned) if the system was to be lasting. And he saw The Jews were essentially opposed to this and were determined to run a tribal looting operation in the country... But he also imported all those blacks into Detroit to depress wages and break the voting power of ethnic whites...
Jude
Did Ford actually care or even think about black voting power?
Thesokorus
auteur_theory
What makes agriculture so different than horticulture in this?
Jeb's Favorite Turtle

I never got the impression that they were "good" with money as much as they are good at hustling and nepotism.

Dogmatic Tower
It's not my idea, just something I've read. As near as I can tell, the main distinction is the presence or absence of the plow. Think of horticulture as glorified gardening: it's not as intensive and systematized as agriculture. No draft animals, few tools, probably no selective breeding, and comparatively little alteration of the landscape.