#physiocrats

*https://www.tumblr.com/racefortheironthrone/741771031361077248/why-do-economists-need-to-shut-up-about

First of all, thank you for including the link! It really helps.

Ok, so let's talk about the physiocrats. This was a pre-Smithian school of economists from France in the 18th century, and they are somewhat complicated to assess because their ideas are a strange mix of surprisingly accurate and completely batshit:

unlike the mercantilists, who they really didn't get along with, the physiocrats thought that growth and especially the circulation of wealth (as opposed to achieving a positive balance of trade and deepening capital pools as the means of driving development) was the most important goal of economic policy.

unlike the mercantilists and the classical economists, the physiocrats believed in the labor theory of value...but only for agricultural labor. The reason they called themselves "physiocrats" is that they believed all wealth came from nature, and that all industrial and commercial and other forms of labor were "unproductive appendages" that existed parasitically off of agricultural labor. This is particularly insane, given that they were writing on the very eve of the Industrial Revolution but well after the Commercial Revolution, so they were well aware that European countries had been making increasingly large amounts of money from stuff that wasn't agriculture. This, they felt, was cheating.

in terms of policy prescriptions, the physiocrats' main agenda items were free trade in grain - they firmly believed that any form of government intervention (say, during a famine to prevent starvation and bread riots) was inherently counterproductive and an unwarranted inference in the natural right of producers to maximize profits, which would eventually lead to higher production and lower prices - and a flat tax on property.

This school of thought was initially quite influential duiring the early stages of the French Revolution, but broke down almost immediately when there was a bad harvest and food prices shot up through the roof, because when large numbers of starving people who have just gone through a revolution and now have weapons and believe they have a right to use them to defend their lives and their freedom see the rational self-interest of grain merchants jacking up the price of their daily staple by 400%, they respond by killing them and putting their heads on pikes and taking the food by force. In that scenario, any government is going to react through intervention if only out of their own rational self-interest. Hell even the ancien régime knew enough to do that, and now the government is run by a bunch of Jacobins.

Joule was faced with the dichotomy: heat is either a substance or a kind of motion. From the experiments which were performed with the magneto-electric machine, he inferred that heat must be a kind of motion, since it could be created or destroyed through motion. Since heat is motion, the experiments were interpreted as conversion from mechanical motion into another kind of motion or vice versa. The conversion factor is called mechanical equivalent of heat. The interpretation of the paddle-wheel experiments is analogous. He defended that friction consisted in the conversion of mechanical power into heat. This statement was not published in accordance with the wish of the Committee to whom the paper was referred (Joule 1884, p. 328).

[...]

Energy is usually presented in the following way: ‘energy can neither be created nor destroyed but only transformed’. If  energy  cannot  be   destroyed,  it  must  be  a  real  existing  thing.  If  its  form   changes,  it  must  be  something  real  as  well. Thus, that statement can easily lead to the concept of energy as something material. The German physician Robert Mayer did not find, however, anything like a substance but rather a methodology for dealing with phenomena. Using observable or  measurable  elements,  he  established equivalences between  different  domains,  such  as  those  which  concern  heat, motion,  position  or  electricity.  Let  us  suppose  that  we  use     Mayer ́s  methodology  for  dealing  with  phenomena. In  this case, we know in advance that an equivalence is established by us between certain quantities. Hence, we do not need the  ‘indestructibility’  of  an   entity  to  express  that  the quantity  does  not  change.  As  we   also  know  that  we establish equivalences between mechanical, thermal, electrical quantities, we do not need to suppose the ‘transformability’ of the same entity.

The above excerpt about energy sounds a lot like Marx's concept of value to me, especially since he analogizes it to weight in Capital, vol. I. After all, value also acts almost as a mere conserved quantity in the context of exchange--the main difference being that value can be “created” and “destroyed” because its also tied to an exclusive domain of activity, i.e. some "transformations" are either irrelevant to the particular world in question in which entities act--due to differentiated fitness landscapes or the presupposition of a given, particular input--or act to antagonize that particularistic world--e.g., waste, death (violence more generally according to Bataille). This also makes it easy to incorporate Bataille's insights on the connection between life and death through his scheme of continuity v. discontinuity (synthesizing Bataille's concept of excess with Marxian economics’ concept of surplus).

In addition, this may have connections to the concept of abstraction as understood in software engineering and programming language development since exchange-value does not just refer to exchanges in the sense of transformations, but exchanges as a consequence of a sort of particularized abstraction (represented by Marx's theory of commodity-money). If it were just a matter of exchanges in general, then treating the economy (understood in terms of value) separately from the ecosystem (understood in terms of energy) to any degree would be a mistake (I don't think it is though, despite obvious continuities between value and energy). That it isn’t a mistake to do so is especially so when one considers that information conservation is at odds with the thermodynamic tendencies of closed systems (more generally, at odds with highly efficient thermic systems), as well as when one considers how economies are in some ways cognitive systems (an insight we get from Hayek), as are the living actors or agents particular economies depend on. Here becomes visible a potential notion of teleology that is already mired with conflict from the start--a sort of conflict involving possibilities.

Needless to be said that conceptualizing energy in terms of motion rather than as substance also means one can't just treat all energy uses as equivalent in that they refer to the "same sort of thing," as if there were no opportunity costs for specific “effects” of "motion" (thereby as if "energy harnessing" involves the containment and local conservation of some specific scarce "stuff," and as if energy is indifferent to the type of "harnessing" it undergoes). This take also creates a distinction between matter and energy. This distinction doesn't necessarily contradict Einsteinian equivalencies, but just implies that this equivalency need not suggest identity (am reminded of Heidegger's critique of reducing identity to a mathematical discourse of equality). This distinction also allows us to think energy outside of the properties established by substance theories. Energy seems precisely to be about the relationship between a whole and its parts (e.g., the conserved quantity being the speculative whole that acts as the denominator to plural entities), and formal/structural possibility sets. This may present some issues for strict mechanism, and would also then possibly link the problematic notion of energy to the problem of non-locality in quantum physics.

See this video and provide me valuable comments: 

Murray Rothbard, summarized,

Florence Gauthier (trans. Cynthia Bouton) Abstract : Control over food supply was advanced in the kingdom of France in the Eighteenth century by Physiocrat economists under the seemingly advantageous label of ‘freedom of grain trade’. In 1764 these reforms brought about a rise in grain prices and generated an artificial dearth that ruined the poor, some of whom died from malnutrition. The King halted the reform and re-established the old regime of regulated prices; in order to maintain the delicate balance between prices and wages, the monarchy tried to limit speculation in subsistence goods and achieved some success in regulating the provisioning of public markets. Le Mercier de la Rivière concluded that executing these reforms required more effective political control. After 1774 the new king gave the Physiocratic reforms a second chance, reforming property rights and establishing an aristocracy of the landed rich. Again, this led to price hikes and as a result so-called ‘popular emotions’ erupted. Turgot ordered military intervention to dispel the protesters, marking a first rupture between the monarchy and the people over speculation on subsistence. Turgot’s experiment failed and he was dismissed, but the Physiocracy had discovered that the market in subsistence offered new opportunities for economic power under the misleading legitimacy of ‘economic laws’. Turgot’s followers, Dupont de Nemours and Condorcet, continued to develop this ‘theory’ that was later translated into a ‘scientific language’ that ultimately asserted the autonomy of the economic sphere and its alleged independence from ethics and politics. The paper examines the continuity of events through the six great jacqueries and the French Revolution, including the all- important agrarian reform that ensued after 1792. Robespierre’s concept of ‘popular political economy’ is analysed and compared with the notion of unfettered private property rights that lies at the heart of neoliberalism.