O que é este blog?

Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.

Mostrando postagens com marcador The Wall Street journal. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador The Wall Street journal. Mostrar todas as postagens

terça-feira, 1 de abril de 2025

The Wall Street Journal condena veementemente a “Substituição de Importações” de Donald Trump

 Trump e seu Primeiro de Abril: ele acredita realmente em “Substituição de Importações”, o equívoco econômico no qual muitos desenvolvimentistas acreditaram, e que muitos esquerdistas ainda acreditam ainda hoje. PRA

Opinião: A fantasia trumpista da “substituição de importações”

As montadoras já investiram bilhões em cadeias de suprimentos eficientes. Com a tarifa de 25% sobre os carros importados, terão de gastar bilhões a mais

Esqueça a ideia de que Donald Trump enxerga as tarifas como um instrumento de negociação para diminuir as taxas dos demais países. Isso sempre foi implausível, e a ilusão se desfez na quarta-feira, com a ordem executiva de Trump impondo tarifas de 25%sobre todos os carros e caminhões importados. Ele quer impostos na fronteira por si só.

“Vamos cobrar dos países por fazer negócios em nosso país e levar nossos empregos, nossa riqueza”, disse Trump ao anunciar as tarifas. É inútil tentar convencê-lo de que ninguém está roubando o sustento dos americanos e que o comércio pode ser benéfico para ambas as partes. Mas os americanos devem saber que estão prestes a pagar mais pelos seus carros e que terão menos opções de escolha.


Trump justifica suas tarifas sobre automóveis como uma “ameaça à segurança nacional”, sob a Seção 232 da Lei de Expansão Comercial de 1962. Aparentemente, ele teme um ataque de “Toyotas assassinas”.

O Canadá e o México, essas “grandes ameaças globais”, representam metade das importações de automóveis dos EUA. Aliados americanos como Coreia do Sul, Japão e Europa são responsáveis pelo restante. As importações oferecem mais opções e preços mais baixos para os americanos do que se todos os carros vendidos nos EUA fossem fabricados domesticamente. Isso representa uma ameaça à segurança de quem, exatamente?

A ordem de Trump lamenta que “apenas metade dos veículos vendidos nos Estados Unidos sejam fabricados domesticamente, um declínio que coloca em risco nossa base industrial e a segurança nacional.” As vendas de carros fabricados nos EUA são menores do que antes da pandemia porque a inflação tornou muitos deles inacessíveis para a classe média.

As tarifas aumentarão ainda mais os preços dos carros — até US$ 10 mil por veículo, segundo a Wedbush Securities. Isso reduzirá as vendas e prejudicará concessionárias e trabalhadores da indústria automotiva nos EUA. Os fabricantes americanos sofrerão mais, pois uma parte relativamente maior de suas vendas ocorre dentro do país. Margens mais baixas afetarão a participação nos lucros dos trabalhadores da indústria automotiva.

Essa é uma das razões pelas quais as ações da GM caíram 7,4% na quinta-feira. A única exceção é a Tesla, que fabrica os carros vendidos nos EUA dentro do próprio país. Considere isso como mais uma vantagem proporcionada pelo governo à Tesla sobre seus concorrentes.

Trump recuou nas tarifas automotivas em seu primeiro mandato depois de ser alertado sobre esses danos. Em vez disso, negociou o USMCA (acordo comercial com México e Canadá), que inclui disposições para aumentar a produção doméstica de automóveis — por exemplo, pelo menos 45% das peças dos veículos devem ser feitas por trabalhadores que ganham pelo menos US$ 16 por hora.

Agora, as tarifas de Trump parecem projetadas para destruir o USMCA e outros acordos comerciais. Seu governo afirma que planeja renegociar o USMCA, mas por que Canadá e México aceitariam isso se Trump pode simplesmente violar seus compromissos quando quiser? Além disso, outras empresas americanas serão afetadas, pois parceiros comerciais vão retaliar.

Alguns assessores de Trump argumentam que ele quer apenas um campo de jogo nivelado em termos de tarifas. Mas a tarifa média dos EUA sobre produtos estrangeiros (2,7%) já é maior do que no Canadá (1,8%), Japão (2%) e Europa (2%), e aproximadamente igual à do México, segundo o Banco Mundial. Enquanto outros países impõem barreiras não tarifárias, os EUA também o fazem.

Andy Laperriere, do Piper Sandler, estima que as tarifas de Trump sobre automóveis, quando combinadas com suas tarifas sobre China, aço e alumínio, elevarão a taxa efetiva de tarifas dos EUA para quase 8% — a mais alta em 75 anos. Isso sem contar as tarifas “recíprocas” que Trump anunciará na próxima semana, que não serão recíprocas de fato. Trump afirmou que elas serão o que ele decidir, podendo mudar a qualquer momento, conforme seu capricho.

Quando perguntado na quarta-feira se suas tarifas seriam permanentes, Trump respondeu “100%”. Também não haverá isenções (exceto para componentes fabricados nos EUA em carros estrangeiros, para evitar prejudicar os fabricantes de peças dos EUA, pelo menos por enquanto). 

Trump quer que todos os 16 milhões de carros vendidos anualmente nos EUA sejam fabricados no país. Mesmo que esse objetivo fosse economicamente racional, levaria muitos anos e centenas de bilhões de dólares em novos investimentos para ser concretizado.

As montadoras já investiram bilhões de dólares em cadeias de suprimentos eficientes para fabricar carros acessíveis à classe média americana. Agora, terão que gastar centenas de bilhões a mais, dinheiro que poderia ser investido de maneira mais produtiva. E tudo porque Trump baseia seu modelo de desenvolvimento econômico na fantasia da “substituição de importações” — modelo que manteve a Índia pobre por décadas.

O presidente Biden tentou transformar a economia dos EUA com sua visão de política industrial estatal. Trump também quer transformá-la, mas segundo sua própria visão industrial. Ele terá que torcer para que sua política de desregulamentação e redução de impostos compense os danos causados por suas tarifas — caso contrário, poderá sofrer o mesmo destino de Biden.

Traduzido do inglês por InvestNews

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From WSJ, April 1st, 2025:

U.S. Stocks Post Worst Quarter Since 2022 on Threat of Trade War - Tariff uncertainty and a flagging tech trade drag the S&P 500 and Nasdaq lower to start 2025. A1


sábado, 11 de março de 2023

Four Nuclear States Can Ruin Your Whole Strategy - Matthew Kroenig (WSJ)

Four Nuclear States Can Ruin Your Whole Strategy

Washington and its allies face new threats from Russia, Iran, North Korea and China—all at once. 

By Matthew Kroenig

The Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2023

In its 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, the Biden administration promised to “reduce the role of nuclear weapons” in U.S. strategy. America’s adversaries have different ideas. In recent days, the rapidly advancing nuclear capabilities of all four of America’s nuclear-capable rivals—Russia, Iran, North Korea and China—have made international news.

Vladimir Putin announced on Feb. 21 that Moscow was suspending its participation in New Start, its last remaining arms-control treaty with the U.S. This means that for the first time since the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty of 1972, there are no negotiated limits on Russia’s nuclear forces.

America hasn’t conducted on-site inspections of Russia’s nuclear arsenal since March 2020 in any case, first because of Covid-19 and then Russian noncooperation during the war in Ukraine. That led the State Department to declare Russia “in noncompliance” with the treaty in January.

It would be prudent to assume Russia may soon expand its strategic nuclear force beyond the 1,550 warheads allowed in the treaty, if it hasn’t done so already. This is in addition to its large stockpile of battlefield and exotic nuclear weapons (such as underwater nuclear-armed drones) that the treaty doesn’t cover.

On Feb. 19, it was reported that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors caught Iran enriching uranium to 84% purity—a hair’s breadth from the 90% needed for a bomb. Outside experts estimate that Iran’s breakout timeline—the time it would take to produce one bomb’s worth of weapons-grade uranium—is now essentially zero.

Some argue that we have more time because it would take months for Iran to fashion a functioning nuclear warhead, but in reality the game will be over as soon as the Iranians have enough material for a bomb. Like North Korea, Tehran could move the material to secret underground locations and fashion warheads undisturbed.

The Biden administration tried to negotiate limits on Iran’s nuclear program, but talks broke down in the face of Tehran’s brutal crackdown on protesters. President Biden says he is willing to use force as a last resort, but the moment of last resort is now and Mr. Biden isn’t readying military options. The 20-year international effort to keep Iran from the bomb has likely failed.

On Feb. 18, North Korea conducted a test of a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile and demonstrated the ability to reach the continental U.S. Pyongyang is the third American adversary capable of holding the U.S. homeland at risk with the threat of nuclear war.

As the North Korea threat grows, American allies worry about the credibility of our extended deterrence, and some consider building their own nuclear arsenals. In public opinion polls, a majority of South Koreans support building an independent nuclear force.

On Feb. 7, the Pentagon notified Congress that China now has more ICBM launchers than the U.S.

What President John F. Kennedy declared in 1962 is still true: America needs to be “second to none” in nuclear weapons. Falling behind means losing a critical element of deterrence.

Instead of pursuing 1990s-era fantasies about reducing the role of nuclear weapons, Washington needs to understand that, for the first time since the Cold War, it is entering a long-term strategic-arms competition. This time will be even more dangerous because the U.S. now faces multiple nuclear-armed rivals.

America needs to strengthen its strategic forces to provide an adequate deterrent for itself and the more than 30 formal treaty allies that rely on U.S. nuclear weapons for their security.

America won the last Cold War in part because it outcompeted the Soviet Union in strategic forces. Washington should remember that lesson if it doesn’t want to lose this one.

Dr. Kroenig is the director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a professor of government at Georgetown. He served as a senior policy adviser for nuclear and missile-defense policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2017-21.

segunda-feira, 19 de julho de 2021

Resistance and Repression in Cuba - Mary Anastasia O’Grady (WSJ)

 Segundo antigo dirigente do KGB, a máquina de repressão do comunismo cubano é muito mais eficiente do que jamais o foi o KGB na finada União Soviética. O número de pessoas envolvidas no trabalho de vigilância é muito maior do que tinha a Stasi na RDA. 

Trecho: "The corrupt former president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, is blaming the U.S. trade embargo for the events. That’s either stupid or evil. Cubans want liberty and justice."

Paulo Roberto de Almeida


Resistance and Repression in Cuba

Protesters knew they would meet brutality. They went out anyway, demanding liberty.

By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
The Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2021 7:12 pm ET

During a visit to Moscow in 1991, members of the Cuban-American National Foundation had a quiet meeting with a top KGB official. Diego Suarez, who was at that meeting, told me last week by phone from Miami that, in the KGB man’s opinion, Havana’s internal-security apparatus was more sophisticated than the Kremlin’s.

A former senior U.S. official told me on Wednesday that when he and others met with the same KGB general— Oleg Kalugin —in Washington in 2001, he told them that the machine controlling the Cuban police state was more “effective” than the Soviet system had been.

This testimony is worth contemplating in the wake of unprecedented antigovernment demonstrations across Cuba last week. The island’s rich ruling elite have spent decades cultivating a monstrous, merciless state-security structure for occasions such as this. Now it has unleashed a wave of terror on the island that would make Stalin blush.

Watching the Interior Ministry and the military do their dirty work, it’s hard to believe regime collapse is imminent. Yet last week’s protests overwhelmed a network that is supposed to be airtight. The breadth of the uprising reveals a nation at the breaking point. Any lingering pretense of regime legitimacy has been shredded—at home and abroad.

On July 11 in the municipality of San Antonio de los Baños, some 22 miles from Havana, a group of pro-democracy activists launched a protest. It was far from the first of its kind. This column has been documenting the work of Cuban dissidents for more than two decades. But on that Sunday something new happened.

Cuba’s internal security is constructed in concentric circles. Closest to home, there is the “committee to defend the revolution,” which has spies in every nook of life and rewards them for ratting out “counter-revolutionaries.” Next there are regime-controlled activists and “rapid response brigades” to meet and punish anyone who ventures outside to protest.

According to Maria Werlau, executive director of Cuba Archives, the ratio of secret police to the population is higher than it was under the Stasi in East Germany. National police, shock troops and elite-trained military squads are another layer of defense.

With Big Brother everywhere, Cubans are taught to tremble before authority and to keep nonconforming thoughts to themselves. Yet in a flash on that day, large numbers of ordinary Cubans made the decision to raise their voices against their oppressors. The outcry spread as if a fuse had been lit. The fear factor failed.

The regime was caught off guard. It shouldn’t have been. The island was simmering with discontent before 2020, but Covid-19 has put regular privation on steroids and exposed the injustice of a system in which the Communist Party enjoys lavish privileges and everyone else grovels for crumbs.

A further unprecedented development: What was happening in San Antonio de los Baños didn’t stay there. Images of Cubans chanting “liberty” and “down with communism” went viral. Within hours, thousands were marching in more than 30 cities. Some reports say that the protests extended to 60 towns and municipalities.

Dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel loaded up buses with trained military hit men and sent them, dressed in civilian clothing and carrying metal bars and sticks, to attack the demonstrators. They chased, beat and dragged citizens in the streets. Uniformed enforcers, some dressed in riot gear, were also used. Some fired weapons. One man was killed.

In the aftermath of the marches there were home-to-home searches for enemies of the revolution. Democracy advocates on the island say some 5,000 people have been arrested and the whereabouts of nearly 200 are unknown. Arrests include important dissident leaders like José Daniel Ferrer and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and the journalist Henry Constantin.

Many protesters were young. They knew their demands would be answered with brutality. They went out anyway, out of desperation, hoping that someone in power would hear their pleas.

Some have. The nephew of Gen. Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, who sits atop the military’s tourism conglomerate, uploaded a video last week condemning repression and calling for change. Some intellectuals and artists quit their associations with the regime, including film director Carlos Lechuga, who on Facebook called the president a murderer. Speculation is rampant that family members of the ruling elite are heading out of the country.

The corrupt former president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, is blaming the U.S. trade embargo for the events. That’s either stupid or evil. Cubans want liberty and justice.

More blood will be shed. But the financially and morally bankrupt authorities won’t be able to feed their security apparatus indefinitely.

The six-decade lie that the revolution produced well-being and equity has been laid bare. What Cubans—and the world—have seen cannot be unseen.

https://www.google.com.br/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/resistance-cuba-protests-coronavirus-san-antonio-de-los-banos-diaz-canel-11626638849


sábado, 19 de junho de 2021

O mundo precisa de uma nova Carta do Atlântico? A primeira, em 1941, era contra o nazismo. Agora é contra a China? - Richard J. Evans (The Wall Street Journal)

Essa tal de nova "Carta do Atlântico", do Biden e do Boris Johnson, é pura demagogia, aproveitando a mística da declaração de 1941, que nem tinha esse nome, e que se destinava a salvar a Grã-Bretanha numa das horas mais dramáticas da sua história, depois da Invencível Armada (destruída pelo próprio canal da Mancha) e da ameaça napoleônica (vencida em Trafalgar). Depois dos espanhóis e dos franceses, os chineses, e contra os americanos desta vez? Joe Biden está exagerando no seu populismo histórico, se rendendo ao que as esquerdas chamariam de "complexo industrial-militar": milhões de dólares canalizados pela paranoia irracional dos generais do Pentágono e pela inacreditável demência dos acadêmicos que caíram no conto de vigário de uma fantasmagórica "armadilha de Tucídides'. Pobre Tucídides, não merecia essa...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Do We Need a New Atlantic Charter?

Eighty years after FDR and Churchill pledged to defend democracy, President Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson want to reenergize the special relationship for a very different world.

President Biden at G-7 Summit: “America Is Back at the Table”
President Biden at G-7 Summit: “America Is Back at the Table”
President Biden at G-7 Summit: “America Is Back at the Table”
During a press conference at the conclusion of the summit between leaders of the Group of Seven on Sunday, President Biden discussed working together with allies, global vaccine donations and how the group plans to approach challenges posed by China. Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

At a summit meeting in England last week, President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed a “new Atlantic Charter,” pledging their countries to work together on a range of issues, from combating climate change and preparing effectively for future pandemics to the defense of democracy and “the rules-based international order.” The agreement intends to “build on the commitments and aspirations set out eighty years ago” in the original Atlantic Charter, signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on August 14, 1941, at their first wartime meeting, held at a U.S. naval base in Newfoundland.

The much-publicized agreement reflects Mr. Johnson’s determination to reorient British foreign policy away from Europe in the wake of Brexit. For Mr. Biden it represents a renewed commitment to America’s traditional allies after four years of tension during the Trump presidency, with its policy of “America First.” As Mr. Johnson said in a statement, “Eighty years ago the U.S. President and British Prime Minister stood together promising a better future. Today we do the same.” But does the new Atlantic Charter really deserve the comparison with the historic original?

In fact, the Atlantic Charter of 1941 was less about remaking the world than about fighting World War II. At the time it was signed, Britain and Germany had been at war for less than two years, and the U.S. hadn’t yet entered the conflict. But the Americans had already begun to help the British, notably through the Lend-Lease Agreement signed the previous March, which provided for the U.S. to supply Britain and its allies with war materials. A major purpose of the Charter was to prepare the American people for their likely future entry into the war by telling them what they would be fighting for. 

In this sense, the Atlantic Charter was more a propaganda statement than a program for action. Its eight clauses, echoed deliberately in the eight clauses of the 2021 Atlantic Charter, affirmed the right of peoples and nations to self-determination, the desirability of lowering trade barriers, the postwar disarmament of the “aggressor nations,” the freedom of the seas, and the necessity of social welfare measures and the alleviation of poverty.

The U.S. and U.K. also said they would not seek territorial gains after the war. Importantly, the defeated nations were to be included in the lowering of trade barriers, a conscious rejection of the punitive economic measures that followed the end of World War I. But the ambitious statement wasn’t signed by the leaders and had no formal legal power. Even the name “Atlantic Charter” wasn’t official; it was invented by the Daily Herald, a left-wing British newspaper, to describe what was formally known as the Joint Declaration by the President and the Prime Minister.

sábado, 27 de fevereiro de 2021

Prevendo o fim do capitalismo: resenha sobre as previsões erradas, de Marx a Keynes - Francesco Boldizzoni

 Infelizmente, o Wall Street Journal só permite ler um pedaço de suas matérias para os não-assinantes, mas o importante é ter o nome do autor e o título do seu livro para procurar na Amazon e ler mais um pouco. Transcrevo o que tem na Amazon como informação sibre o livro, já tendo enviado um Sample para minha consulta, antes de transcrever uma pequena parte do book-review do WSJ:

Francesco Boldizzoni:

Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures since Karl Marx

(Harvard University Press, 2020)


PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

Intellectuals since the Industrial Revolution have been obsessed with whether, when, and why capitalism will collapse. This riveting account of two centuries of failed forecasts of doom reveals the key to capitalism’s durability.

Prophecies about the end of capitalism are as old as capitalism itself. None have come true. Yet, whether out of hope or fear, we keep looking for harbingers of doom. In Foretelling the End of Capitalism, Francesco Boldizzoni gets to the root of the human need to imagine a different and better world and offers a compelling solution to the puzzle of why capitalism has been able to survive so many shocks and setbacks.

Capitalism entered the twenty-first century triumphant, its communist rival consigned to the past. But the Great Recession and worsening inequality have undermined faith in its stability and revived questions about its long-term prospects. Is capitalism on its way out? If so, what might replace it? And if it does endure, how will it cope with future social and environmental crises and the inevitable costs of creative destruction? Boldizzoni shows that these and other questions have stood at the heart of much analysis and speculation from the early socialists and Karl Marx to the Occupy Movement. Capitalism has survived predictions of its demise not, as many think, because of its economic efficiency or any intrinsic virtues of markets but because it is ingrained in the hierarchical and individualistic structure of modern Western societies.

Foretelling the End of Capitalism takes us on a fascinating journey through two centuries of unfulfilled prophecies. An intellectual tour de force and a plea for political action, it will change our understanding of the economic system that determines the fabric of our lives.

REVIEW

Boldly written and brimming with new insights on every page, this is not your grandfather's old and staid intellectual history. Boldizzoni takes us through a fast-paced history of capitalism's failed doomsayers--only to then explain why they clearly underestimated its elongated life expectancy and stubborn durability. A superb intellectual history of how people have (wrongly) predicted and imagined the end of capitalism from the time of Marx until today.--Eli Cook, author of The Pricing of Progress

Foretelling the End of Capitalism is an essential book for anyone interested in intellectual history and political economy. It will play a major role in current debates on capitalism and its future, as well as on crisis and crisis theory.--Wolfgang Streeck, author of How Will Capitalism End?

Francesco Boldizzoni shows how predicting the collapse of capitalism is as old as capitalism itself. He illuminates a tradition of economic thinking that has justified do-nothing posturing in the name of revolution, and how it resists learning lessons of its own failures. This book is also a brilliant study of the cult of forecasting.--Jeremy Adelman, Princeton University

This beautifully written book captures the peculiar complicity between hope and disappointment that characterizes prophecies about the end of capitalism over the last three centuries. It will be of great interest to readers, both as a cautionary tale about prophecy and as a model study of the logic of capitalism itself.--Arjun Appadurai, New York University

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Francesco Boldizzoni is Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the author of two books about economic and intellectual history, The Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic Historyand Means and Ends: The Idea of Capital in the West, 1500-1970.

PRODUCT DETAILS

  • ASIN: B082DK6MBC
  • Publisher: Harvard University Press (May 12, 2020)
  • Publication date: May 12, 2020
  • Language: English
  • File size: 2172 KB

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Politics: ‘Foretelling the End of Capitalism’ Review

From  Mill to Marx and on to Keynes, a history of misdiagnosis.

The New York Stock Exchange.

PHOTO: ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES

‘Prophecies about the end of capitalism . . . have dotted the history of modern social science since its inception,” Francesco Boldizzoni observes in “Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures Since Karl Marx” (Harvard, 326 pages, $35). “Almost all of the great social theorists, at one point or another in life, engaged in forecasting.” I am inclined to look favorably on any book purporting to expose the follies of revered intellectuals, and the prospect of a history chronicling end-of-capitalism predictions filled me with anticipation.  

Mr. Boldizzoni was of course under no obligation to write the book I was hoping he had written, and he has not done so. He accepts his prognosticators’ premise that capitalism is basically a malign system that exacerbates inequality and “turns culture into business and . . . enslaves minds to its logic.” Moreover his explanations for the failure of predictions by Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Max Weber and John Maynard Keynes, among others, strike this reviewer as hopelessly abstruse and heavily reliant on the economic theories that lured these intellectuals into making foolish predictions in the first place.

The abrasiveness of the book’s title, together with the author’s highly self-assured tone, led me to expect a bit more in the way of demolition. Mr. Boldizzoni treats his subjects and their “misadventures” with ample deference. He gently concedes, for example, that Marx’s labor theory of value—the theory that a product or service’s value is determined by the labor required to produce it —was wrong. That’s a pretty important thing to be wrong about for a man whose economic theories dominated half the globe for a century, is it not? Mr. Boldizzoni brushes the problem aside, since it “does not disprove the claim that exploitation and the appropriation of surplus value underlie the wage-labor relation.” It doesn’t disprove a lot of things, but it does prove that Marx was a poor judge of economics and human relations.

So reluctant is he to confront the hubris of his subjects’ theories that Mr. Boldizzoni, a professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, actually does precisely what he criticizes them for doing: He predicts the end of capitalism. “Capitalism will indeed end sooner or later,” he writes, without the slightest sense of irony. He can draw this conclusion, he reasons, because “capitalism is a historically bound formation just like the economic and social systems that preceded it in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period.” 

Is it, though? Mr. Boldizzoni, like almost all writers on the left and some on the right, writes of capitalism as a “system,” sometimes even assigning agency to it, as if it were designed by some nefarious force. It’s never clear what he means by the term. What if the thing intellectuals call capitalism is nothing more than the freedom and order necessary to borrow money for the...

(fim da resenha aberta no WSJ)