O primeiro mercantilista...

Se no último texto que colocamos aqui no blog tivemos Juan de Mariana, extremista libertário, que instado a escrever um livro para agradar Felipe II, da Espanha [livro dedicado ao filho deste,Felipe III], resolveu fazer uma defesa franca do TIRANICÍDIO, elencou vários tiranos e os colocou como tais, bem como resolveu afirmar que a soberania do Rei vem do povo, na contramão da então crescente apologia ao poder concentrado. Já em outro livro denunciou a prática de alterar o conteúdo das moedas para ganhar um "extra" e,explicitamente, considerou a prática como criminosa. Ou seja, fazer média não era com Juan de Mariana.

 

Em contraste a esse grande homem, apresentamos Carafa, mercantilista, protecionista e que adorava bajular poderosos e, afinal, começou a pensar em termos de "agregados", "indução da economia", entre outras excrecências . A fonte é a mesma do texto anterior [o link está lá, o excerto é da terceira seção do sexto capítulo], que é o importantíssimo livro de Rothbard sobre o pensamento econômico anterior a Adam Smith.

 

"The Florentine humanists of the early fifteenth century had been optimistic for man, for his quest for

virtus (or virtu) or excellence, and for the 'honour, praise, and glory' which more traditional Christians had thought due only to God. It was therefore easy for the later, sixteenth century humanists to transfer that quest for excellence and glory from individual man to being the sole function of the prince. Thus Castiglione declares that the courtier's chief goal, 'the end to which he is directed', must be to advise his prince so that the latter may attain 'the pinnacle of glory' and make himself 'famous and illustrious in the world' .

 

The earlier republican humanists had nurtured the ideal of 'liberty', by which they meant, not the modern concept of individual rights, but republican, generally oIigarchial, 'self-government'. Castiglione expressly condemns such old notions, on behalf of the monarchical virtues of peace, absence of discord, and total obedience to the absolute prince. In The Book of the Courtier, one of the characters in the dialogue protests that princes 'hold their subjects in the closest bondage' so that liberty is gone. Castiglione shrewdly counters, in age-old terms used in numerous apologia for despotism, that such liberty is only a plea that we be allowed to 'live as we like' rather than 'according to good laws'. Since liberty is only licence, then, a monarch is needed to 'establish his people in such laws and ordinances that they may live in ease and peace' .

A leading writer of advice-books to both the prince and the courtier, and a man who bears the dubious distinction of being perhaps the first mercantilist, was the Neapolitan duke, Diomede Carafa (1407-87). Carafa wrote The Perfect Courtier

while serving at the court of Ferdinand, king of Naples, in the 1480s, as well as "The Office of a Good Prince" during

the same period. In The Perfect Courtier, Carafa set the tone for Castiglione's enormously influential work a generation later. In his

Office of a Good Prince, Carafa set the model for the form of economic advice presented by consultant administrators. As in many later works, the book begins with principles of general policy and defence, then goes on to administration of justice, to public finance, and finally economic policy proper.

In detailed policies, Carafa's advice is relatively sensible, and not nearly as totally power-oriented or as statist as later mercantilists advising fully fledged nation-states. The budget should be balanced, since forced loans are comparable to robbery and theft, and taxes should be equitable and moderate in order not to oppress labour or drive capital from the country. Business should be left alone but, on the other hand, Carafa called for subsidies of industry, agriculture, and commerce by the state, as well as substantial welfare expenditures. In contrast to the later mercantilists, foreign merchants, declared Carafa, should be made welcome because their activities are highly useful to the country.

 

But there is no hint in Carafa, in contrast to the scholastics, of any desire to understand or analyse market processes. The only important question was how the ruler can manipulate them. As Schumpeter wrote of Carafa: 'The normal processes of economic life harbored no problem for Carafa. The only problem was how to manage and improve them'.

 

Schumpeter also attributes to Carafa the first conception of a national economy, of the entire country as one large business unit managed by the prince. Carafa was,

so far as I know, the first to deal comprehensively with the economic problems of

the nascent modern state the fundamental idea that Carafa clothed in his conception

of the Good Prince of a National Economy... [which] is not simply the

sum total of the individual households and firms or of the groups and classes within the borders of a state.

It is conceived as a sort of sublimated business unit,

something that has a distinct existence and distinct interests of its own and needs to be managed like a big farm. "

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