From: Madars Virza To: "jeffrey E." <[email protected]> Cc: Steve Bannon Subject: Re: For Steve Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2018 23:50:20 +0000 Attachments: The_Logic_of Gift.pdf Thank you, Jeffrey! This Sunday was magical and I'd be very much interested to be in the school :) An interesting question we discussed -- should giving a "hugs"P'endorsements"/etc require getting a counter- endorsement of some sort. It seems to me that answer is no -- market dynamics would make it easier for external actors to rack up a lot of reputation (can clearly imagine, say, Correct The Record doing so). There's a captivating interview with Shimon Peres (given just weeks before he passed) where he talks about giving vs exchanging ft tp://www.tabletmag comijewish-news-and-politics/214621/one-last-interview): "Why is America great?" I asked him. "Because they were givers. Why is Europe in trouble? Because they are takers. America is giving; people think it's because they are generous. I think it's because they are wise. If you give, you create friends. The most beneficial investment is making friends. "America had the guts to take the Marshall Plan, a huge piece of their GNP that they gave to this dying Europe. And in this way, they have shown that this is the best investment in the world." There is no European country that didn't take an empire. The French and the British, the Portuguese, everybody. And what happened? They were thrown out of there and left with nothing. England, the greatest empire from sunrise to sunset, all the oceans, and the nice, nonviolent Indians threw them out and left them with nothing but three small islands, they don't know what to do with them. "Believe me," I told Putin, "enemies and animosity are the greatest waste in life. You are investing in a foolish thing." A friend wrote an article contrasting the logics of exchange, duty, and giving. It has quite a Thomistic penumbra (and I'm attaching it here): The logic of exchange and the logic