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"But none of that really tells us very much about whether or not the United States of America tilted too far in the free market direction. Today it’s still the case that Communism is very bad (just look at North Korea), but the existence of Communism is not a macro-scale global problem. By contrast, uncontrolled greenhouse gas pollution is a very severe global problem in part because the world as a whole is much less poor than it used to be. Financial liberalization has been badly mishandled. Median wage growth looks to have decoupled from productivity growth. Workers in rich countries are being buffeted by a lot of shocks related to growth in the third world. It’s possible to maintain that lectures on the virtues of free markets still point to the correct solutions to these problems. But even if you want to make that case, you need to acknowledge that the problems facing the world are substantially different from the ones of thirty years ago. In retrospect, a lot of what’s happened in the developed world since 1980 seems to have been based on the logic that since the mixed economy with regulated markets and a welfare state has outperformed command and control socialism, then clearly a pure to free market purism will produce even better results. But what if the success of the mixed economy with regulated markets and a welfare state proves that we should endorse … a mixed economy with regulated markets and a welfare state? Just because one slice of pizza is delicious doesn’t mean you should eat the whole pie."
Matt Yglesias, Times Change (via ilyagerner)
Interesting…
We all know that moving in this direction will elicit the screams of “socialism” from the usual predictable corners. The tired rhetoric lives on long after the cold war that orchestrated it fades out of memory. The audience for that rhetoric is fast fading, too. It is long overdue in the US for us to have a genuine conversation and struggle over our current economic system. Capitalism has gotten a free pass for far too long.
We take pride in questioning, challenging, criticising and debating our health, education, military, transportation and other basic social institutions. We argue whether their current structures and functioning serve our needs. We work our way to changing them so they perform better. And so it should be.
Yet, for decades now, we have failed to similarly question, challenge, criticise and debate our economic system: capitalism. Because a taboo protected capitalism, cheerleading and celebrating it became obligatory. Criticism and questions got banished as heresy, disloyalty or worse. Behind the protective taboo, capitalism degenerated into the ineffective, unequal, crisis-ridden social disaster we all now bear.
Capitalism is the problem – and the joblessness, homelessness, insecurity, and austerity it now imposes everywhere are the costs we bear. We have the people, the skills and the tools to produce the goods and services needed for a just society to prosper. We just need to reorganise our producing units differently, to go beyond a capitalist economic system that no longer serves our needs.
Edit: it’s more hopeful than anything but Richard D. Wolff has some wonderful books on the subject, don’t judge him entirely by the utopian vision that he seems to allude to at the end of the quote I selected. Trust me, he’s a great economist.
(via thenoobyorker) This is good too: “Humanity learned to do without kings and emperors and slave masters. We found our way to a democratic alternative, however partial and unfinished the democratic project remains. We can now take the next step to realise that democratic project.”
Reblogged from thenoobyorker
