More antisocialism from Matt Stoller
No, the Epstein system is not like communism.
I have a longer piece on the way about how capitalism created Epstein, but in the meantime I can’t resist responding to a comment by Matt Stoller:
The Jeff Epstein saga isn’t a scandal about pedophilia, it’s about a Russian word called ‘blat’, a Soviet-era word meaning “the use of personal networks for obtaining goods and services in short supply and for circumventing formal procedures.” It’s about a type of government….it’s statecraft to allow a superclass to systematically escape formalized rules…This kind of governance is particularly important in Soviet-style states, where everyone knows the rules are fake, where skirting the system IS the system.
This is, at best, an extremely misleading analogy. Blat was indeed about trading favors and black marketeering in order to circumvent the law, but in the Soviet Union this was something that literally everyone did. If you needed a light bulb, you might give a neighbor who had an extra one a new pair of socks. If you wanted tickets to a concert, you might trade your light bulb. One of the most interesting and consequential features of blat was that it was ubiquitous and accessible to everyone.
The Epstein system was very different. Its most important feature was that it leveraged extraordinary wealth and power in order to circumvent the law. To participate in blat you just had to glance over your shoulder to see if the authorities were nearby — and even if they were, you could often pay them off with a trivial bribe. To participate in the Epstein system, you generally had to fly a private jet out to his private island, or you had to be able to get someone a cushy “consultant” job at a Fortune 500 company, or you had to invest millions of dollars in one of the offshore accounting schemes that he managed. Much of what he did, it turns out, was completely legal.
