Starry Aspirant

The financial political practices of the Yanukovych era… In 2016 a series of articles appeared in the Ukrainian press offering a glimpse into the operation of a wide-ranging and expensive system of political payments run by the Party of Regions (PoR), the political organisation of Viktor Yanukovych, in the years leading up to and during his presidency in 2010-14. Originating in the “black ledger” (off-book accounts) of Yanukovych and his circle, the documents on which these articles were based had been handed to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) by Viktor Trepak, a former deputy head of the Ukrainian Security Service, allegedly in response to the blocking of his investigation into the financial crimes of the Yanukovych era (Kuznetsov, 2017; Sukhov, 2016). Supporting these accounts, in an interview from 2017, Taras Chornovil, who ran the presidential election campaign of Yanukovych in 2004, recounts that PoR practice of “paying for deputies from other parliamentary...

Factions rise dominance from the late 1990s but remain institutionally weak In her book, Sarah Whitmore outlines the constitutive role of the Rada in the formation of the post-Soviet Ukrainian state, and the slow process of its institutionalisation in a wider political context in the course of the 1990s and early 2000s. By institutionalisation, she means the creation and observation of procedural norms that enhance organisational coherence and autonomy. In particular, Whitmore details the emergence of parliamentary standing committees and political factions—which are central to the investigation of this chapter—as the main organisational subdivisions for the allocation of parliamentary work. During this period, the parliamentary committees, dealing with the preparation, review and implementation of specialist legislation, were able to enhance authority as their expertise grew, as they became more representative of the composition of parliament, as well as locations for legislative deb...

Hobbes  The desire for self-preservation drives rational human selfishness: freedom leads to unending war. Social survival requires popular disarmament: authority should be contracted out to a ruler able to impose law & order. Burke  Government arbitrates between competing wants to prevent social chaos. Evolutionary governmental norms are embodied in culture & tradition, which can't be grasped by reason. Aristocrats' property offers them power & incentive to check the monarchy, + they are imbued with the habits of rule. Schmitt The rule of law depends on application of precedents, but to uphold constitutional continuity in a state crisis, a political guarantor of the legal system, who is himself above the law, is required. See Hobbes. Rand Selfishness is rational & right. State regulation restrains the self-interested creativity of the businessmen on whom production & civilisation depend.  Hayek I Individual economic choice is politic...

In the past, wealth and its social distribution were not routinely or extensively covered in economics. An important reason for this is that the analytical point of departure of the dominant neo-classical school—in particular, the theory of the distribution of factor incomes—begins after the distribution of wealth has taken place (Stilwell, 2019, p. 96). In the course of the past decade, however, wealth as a subject of academic investigation has re-emerged, in part boosted by the worldwide success of Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century , which is a detailed empirical investigation into the changing patterns of economic inequality over the long term, with a focus on western Europe and the US. In the book, Piketty runs through some of prominent early works on wealth and income inequality from the pre-history of the subject. This covers the ideas of Malthus, Ricardo and Marx, and ends with the optimistic prognosis of Simon Kuznets in the US following the Second W...

More reading on neo-classical economics. It was invented in the 1870s but is still at the heart of mainstream economics. It’s probably more fundamental to the resurgence so-called free-market capitalism from the 1970s than “neo-liberalism”, the corresponding global political project. Especially, I’m anxious not to do a hatchet-job on neo-classicism that skates over the power behind its enduring appeal, despite some of its well-known obvious drawbacks. On this, I was thinking yesterday about the idea of perfect competition, and what an amazing tool for wealth-creation—as the basis for universal human freedom—and a severe check on capitalist excess, it would be, if it were not a mostly unattainable ideal-type. It’s a transcendental dream of freedom and democracy of a sort. (Perfect competition describes a situation in which many small firms without price-setting power compete to sell interchangeable products, achieving just enough profits to sustain the industry to meet consumer ...

The argument of my thesis so far: 1.     Oligarchs and oligarchy are differentiated from other kinds of elite and elite rule by extreme wealth. 2.     Wealth conditions the methods and logic of oligarch political strategies and actions. Large wealth differentials can stoke social and political tensions, creating specific kinds of protection problems for oligarchs, but permits the purchase of protection, whether coercive or political/ media influence. 3.     The original and subsequent wealth-enhancing economic schemes of the Ukrainian oligarchs are characterised by indirect extraction via the state. Some schemes are more transient than others, as modes of extraction of this kind evolve. 4.     Once in motion, the economic-political relationship goes both ways: wealth leads to political influence, but political position and influence can allow the accumulation of wealth. 5.     Despite the existence of wealthy oligarchs at...