Economics: What might work, what should work, what has worked (command v. open market)

[The Anti-Targ]

3 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Because today we have many owners of wealth, and many more can source that wealth (entrepreneurs, start-ups, etc) so the worst, most wasteful ideas will be competed away and the good ideas will see new competition enter to improve the idea, add price competition or just another choice.

Public servants won't be accountable.  The voting public doesn't have the expertise, patience or time horizon to evaluate their performance.  Any competition they enter will be to secure persistent power, e.g. pandering to the base, pork barrel spending in their constituency, supporting the party dogma, etc, rather than improving the investment of capital. 

I'm confident in saying this because it has been proven over a very long time period over a wide variety of regions, cultures and levels of government.  This isn't a new idea, it has been tried many times.  It keeps failing for the same reason.

Aren't a lot of the failings complicated by the fact of significant external interference? I mean you cite Cuba and Venezuela as prime examples of failures, but given the extreme reaction against both countries on the part of the USA with sanctions and trade bans spanning decades in the case of Cuba, you can't necessarily pin the failure solely on the economic and political system when you have corrupting influences from outside. Maybe they would have failed on their own, but maybe they would have evolved into a more stable system which was still broadly socialist in key elements of economic management.

A lot of the other examples you cite are dictatorships of one type or another, which also complicates matters because under those systems of governance the opportunity for popular democracy to have it's influence is entirely eliminated.

Are there any really clean examples of this system failing without the presence of external forces (mostly the USA) actively working to destroy it, or the country being run absent functional democracy? It seems all of the examples being given were corrupt or severely undermined from the outset and thus difficult to ascribe failure solely or mainly to the economic model.

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

19 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Aren't a lot of the failings complicated by the fact of significant external interference? I mean you cite Cuba and Venezuela as prime examples of failures, but given the extreme reaction against both countries on the part of the USA with sanctions and trade bans spanning decades in the case of Cuba, you can't necessarily pin the failure solely on the economic and political system when you have corrupting influences from outside. Maybe they would have failed on their own, but maybe they would have evolved into a more stable system which was still broadly socialist in key elements of economic management.

A lot of the other examples you cite are dictatorships of one type or another, which also complicates matters because under those systems of governance the opportunity for popular democracy to have it's influence is entirely eliminated.

Are there any really clean examples of this system failing without the presence of external forces (mostly the USA) actively working to destroy it, or the country being run absent functional democracy? It seems all of the examples being given were corrupt or severely undermined from the outset and thus difficult to ascribe failure solely or mainly to the economic model.

 

Isn’t the next excuse that the whole planet didn’t adopt the Marxist system and it doesn’t work unless everyone adopts it?

[lokisnow]

i am pretty ignorant about Cuba but is it actually an example of a failed state?

My understanding is:

Capitalism and colonialism in Cuba led to a dictatorship (under Batista), massive state corruption of state officials, out of control poverty, unemployment above 70%, no universal education system, extremely high rates of illiteracy, medical care, clean water and electricity only for the extremely wealthy, and most importantly an economy almost entirely based on mono culture sugar plantations that were little different from slave labor.

there were also more minor problems with Cuba being an american mafia playground and tourism built around gambling and prostitution but these was always less significant than the economic, corruption, health and education issues driving the revolutionaries to over throw the dictatorship. And even after the overthrow, other than the worst committers of crimes against humanity (who were received trials and were sentenced by their judiciary system), most of the bureaucrat criminal caste were granted amnesty and allowed to freely emigrate to the United States (where they proceeded to fuck up Florida politics for the rest of us) if they didn't want to stay in the country.

my understanding is that Cuban today under socialism has medical care available to everyone, universal primary education and literacy, clean water, rural electrification, a robust university system, normal unemployment rates, a diversified economy, a large tourism industry based on standard seaside resort amenities, correct?

I'm not saying it's a paradise--as I said I'm fairly ignorant outside of these broadstrokes--but if we are saying universal health care, universal literacy, a modernized, diversified economy, electrification and clean water are an example of a failed economic system... well I'll have what she's having.

[Iskaral Pust]

@The Anti-Targ no-one had sanctions against Venezuela.  Everyone was queuing up to buy their oil.  That country could be Norway but they’re closer to Zimbabwe.  Most of the Latin American countries have had democratically elected Peronist regimes at some point and they failed without any interference from the US.  For every Grenada or Contras there are multiple instances of Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, etc imploding under years of corruption and fiscal mismanagement, digging painfully out for a few years and then repeating again.  Cuba is the only one who never got the chance to fail solely by their own poor policy, although I don’t doubt they would have. 

And unfortunately more of the incompetent African governments are democratically elected than I wish were the case.  Even if many of them start out as a military coup, they get re-elected for decades as populist socialist strong-men while looting the country and preferencing their native tribe.  Look at Mugabe and  Zuma.  Southeast Asia has had similar problems.  Even India, the world’s largest democracy, is drifting in this direction under Modi.  Populist socialism is an easy way to garner votes but it always collapses under corruption and its inherent sustainability: you run out of other people’s money.

[The Anti-Targ]

1 minute ago, Scott de Montevideo! said:

Isn’t the next excuse that the whole planet didn’t adopt the Marxist system and it doesn’t work unless everyone adopts it?

Probably depends on whether you want to approach the question scientifically or ideologically.

[Larry of the Lawn]

1 hour ago, Scott de Montevideo! said:

Isn’t the next excuse that the whole planet didn’t adopt the Marxist system and it doesn’t work unless everyone adopts it?

Where did you stop beating your wife?

[Altherion]

7 hours ago, felice said:

How is that worse than what we've got now, where the private owners of wealth don't event need to pretend to care about anything other than their own interests?

In the current system (i.e. hybrid economies with the market component dominant), the median standard of living is higher than it ever was in a command economy or even a hybrid with the command dominant. If the inequality keeps getting worse to the point where this is no longer the case, people might reconsider.

7 hours ago, felice said:

And I don't think anyone has commented on the subsidised crowdfunding model, where the decisions are entirely up to the general public and no individual has significant power over allocation.

The general public lacks the expertise to make decisions regarding a large number of products and services (e.g. all electronics) and is rather likely to be fooled by swindlers on many others. It's not even a matter of educations: today's world is complicated enough that even people who are both smart and educated are only qualified to make decisions in a fairly narrow set of domains.

[Spring Bass]

On 7/16/2018 at 7:49 PM, lokisnow said:

Capitalism and colonialism in Cuba led to a dictatorship (under Batista), massive state corruption of state officials, out of control poverty, unemployment above 70%, no universal education system, extremely high rates of illiteracy, medical care, clean water and electricity only for the extremely wealthy, and most importantly an economy almost entirely based on mono culture sugar plantations that were little different from slave labor.

That's not quite right. Cuba had relatively high income per capita in Latin America and greatly improving literacy and medical access in the 1950s, although there was a big rural-urban divide on it. 

There's a really good Jacobin essay on Cuba (given that it's Jacobin, it's fair to say they're not going to have a conservative bias against it or against socialism):

Quote

On the eve of the 1959 Revolution, Cuba had the fourth highest per capita income in Latin America, after Venezuela, Uruguay, and Argentina.

And although average per capita income is an insufficient, and sometimes misleading, indicator of general economic development, other indicators support his picture of the pre-revolutionary Cuban economy: in 1953, Cuba also ranked fourth in Latin America according to an average of twelve indexes covering such items as percentage of labor force employed in mining, manufacturing, and construction, percentage of literate persons, per capita electric power, newsprint, and caloric food consumption.

Yet, at that time the country’s economy was also suffering from stagnation and the pernicious effects of sugar monoculture, including substantial unemployment (partly caused by the short sugar cane season of three or four months). Most importantly, the national indexes of living standards hid dramatic differences between the urban (57 percent of the population in 1953) and rural areas (43 percent), especially between Havana (21 percent of Cuba’s total population) and the rest of the country. The Cuban countryside was plagued by malnutrition, widespread poverty, poor health, and lack of education.

. . . . . .

The government’s supporters point to Cuba’s achievements in education and health (in particular, its low infant mortality) as conclusive evidence for its more progressive economic policies. And indeed Cuba has performed very well in the Human Development Index (HDI), which combines income, health, and education statistics.

Besides the issue of monetary income, the HDI ignores other factors that make living conditions in Cuba difficult. These include the irregular supply and quality of food, housing, toiletries, and birth control devices for women and men. The same applies to the poor state of roads, inter-urban bus and railway transport (premium transportation services exist but are costly and therefore out of the reach of most Cubans), and the delivery of basic necessities such as water, electricity, and garbage collection.

Take water, for example. Viewed in one way, Cuba ranks well in that regard, with 95 percent of its population officially having access to drinking water. But serious water shortages are a normal condition of life in Cuba. This is partially due to seasonal droughts in certain regions, particularly in the eastern half of the island. But the most important cause of that shortage is the deteriorated infrastructure — broken pipes and numerous leaks — going back to well before the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

Here's a longer critique of the gains in health care and literacy that Communist Cuba has made (it also makes an interesting point about how heavily dependent on Soviet subsidies Cuba was from the 1970s onward - when the Soviet Union fell, it caused an absolutely devastating economic crisis in the country). 

I will give them credit for bridging the urban-rural divide. Rural poverty and under-development wasn't just a problem in Cuba - before the FDR era agricultural programs and rural electrification, many US farmers were essentially living in a different century from their urban counterparts. Worldwide, doing heavy land reform was often a valuable step towards greater economic development (see South Korea, Japan, and the effort in Guatemala that was aborted by a US coup in the 1950s). 

 

[OldGimletEye]

18 hours ago, SeanF said:

It seems to me to be a solution in search of a problem.  The social market economy works a good deal better than the various alternatives that have been tried.

I do agree that the various degrees of social democracy that were implemented shortly after World War 2, primarily in the United States, and in Europe seem to have produced the best results in maintaining some amount of equality, while keeping economic growth intact.

But, I do wonder, or at least here in the US, whether such a system can last, since a large number of wealthy people, and their ideological allies, reject such a system as being legitimate and do everything in their power to dismantle such a system.

FDR was so dominant that even many of his opponents in the Republican Party came to accept the legacy of the New Deal, even if they thought it went overboard in some respects. Dewey who ran against Trump was a relative Republican moderate who didn’t reject it. And then he would later help to engineer the candidacy of Eisenhower, as he thought Robert Taft, who was of the old American right, would never stand a chance with the American public. And Eishenhower himself wrote a letter to his brother, who was apparently an extreme righty, that any party that challegned the major premises of the New Deal would soon find itself in the dustbin of history and warning about the rightwing extremism of the likes of the Hunt brothers in Texas. And it would seem if you were sitting the 1950s Eishenhower’s warnings would have seemed to have been correct.

And yet, even during that time many wealthy and conservatives were fierily opposed to the legacy of the New Deal, even though it more or less kept capitalism in place, and may have even preserved it, as it may have defused more extreme left wing politics. Old William Buckely got his start attacking the system. And he even went so far to accuse Keynes as being Marxist inspired, when the truth was Keynes was rather cool to Marx and certainly didn’t think a lot of David Ricardo whose influence one can see in Marx. This illustrates nicely the conservative freak out, about mild social democratic regimes.

The whole American conservative movement got it’s start as being opposed to the fairly mild social democracy of FDR. And to date, they have been successful in rolling much of it back or attacking it, the current Republican Party, which has certainly become much more conservative, than it had say in the 1960s, now having more power than it did in the 1920s. And I think, it should be rather apparent by now that the Republican Party jumps to the wishes of it’s wealthy donors, with it’s latest insane corporate tax bill. It could have passed a sane version, being somewhere in the range of about 25%- 30%, but seemingly the donors just insisted on a 20% rate, so that what they got.

And the American conservative movement has been willing to engage in some very dubious tactics like gleefully taking advantage of the racism which helped to cause the implosion of the old New Deal coalition.

The promise of the American Conservative movement, particularly under Reagan, was that if you bought into their “business friendly supply side growth policies”, economic growth would be so awesome, you wouldn’t mind your union being busted up and your social democracy being destroyed. And yet, there is little evidence, that Republican policies have ever actually produced this extra awesome economic growth. Certainly, the truth about the Reagan recovery was that it was more about monetary policy than it was about Reagan’s tax cuts. By now, it should be apparent, that promises of the Republican Party and the conservative movement is largely a fraud, but yet that didn’t stop them from gaining enormous power, to the point that American Democracy is threatened and the liberal international order that the US helped put together, after WW2, looks like it is going to fall apart.

Of course not all the legacies of the New Deal have been wiped out yet. But, the Republican Party will still continue to try. And of course, it still doesn’t necessarily attack that legacy outright, but rather couches it’s language in term of “fiscal responsibility” or “economic efficiency”, or “economic growth”.

I think this article below by Krugman highlights nicely much of the intellectual shennigans that occurs on the American right.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/14/opinion/benefits-work-and-poverty.html

I think what is truly maddening about this article is the new found conservative concern for employment and yet conservatives hamstrung American policy making for about 10 years in getting the US back to full employment. And their arguments went from being outright insane (like their gold buggism) to being just plain wrong (like their prediction of “rampant inflation” being around the corner). And yet, for all their intellectual screw ups, they paid no price, now finding themselves holding more power than they have in about 100 years.

And I sit here and wonder, is even a mild American social democracy politically sustainable? Or was it largely something that was the result of special circumstances, ie the Great Depression and WW2, that will eventually be rolled back as it is continuously assaulted by wealthy ideologues who think the system is “unfair” to them or makes great impingements upon their “freedom”.

And my first inclination is to say yes, it can be, if we make some institutional adjustments, like boosting the political clout of organized labor and by getting a handle on the corrupting influence of money on politics, or perhaps making the American system more democratic so it more closely reflects the wishes of American people. And I think this would work and avoid the probable bad results that seemingly occurs when capital is completely socialized.

But, just for the sake of argument, let’s say it won’t work. Then at that point, I think it’s worth thinking about alternative economic arrangements, keeping in mind  of course, the past failures of regimes that have tried to socialize capital and then have failed. I’m certainly have a deep skepticism about such a thing, would prefer more “incremental” changes, and wouldn’t recommended it, at this point, that it should be the goal of left wing or left leaning political parties. But, that said, I think it’s something worth thinking about.

[SeanF]

8 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Aren't a lot of the failings complicated by the fact of significant external interference? I mean you cite Cuba and Venezuela as prime examples of failures, but given the extreme reaction against both countries on the part of the USA with sanctions and trade bans spanning decades in the case of Cuba, you can't necessarily pin the failure solely on the economic and political system when you have corrupting influences from outside. Maybe they would have failed on their own, but maybe they would have evolved into a more stable system which was still broadly socialist in key elements of economic management.

A lot of the other examples you cite are dictatorships of one type or another, which also complicates matters because under those systems of governance the opportunity for popular democracy to have it's influence is entirely eliminated.

Are there any really clean examples of this system failing without the presence of external forces (mostly the USA) actively working to destroy it, or the country being run absent functional democracy? It seems all of the examples being given were corrupt or severely undermined from the outset and thus difficult to ascribe failure solely or mainly to the economic model.

 

When you have regimes that employ massive coercion against their internal enemies, and confiscate property, you get an international reaction.  Foreign companies pull out, foreign citizens sue for lost assets, and press their governments to impose sanctions.

[SeanF]

46 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

I do agree that the various degrees of social democracy that were implemented shortly after World War 2, primarily in the United States, and in Europe seem to have produced the best results in maintaining some amount of equality, while keeping economic growth intact.

But, I do wonder, or at least here in the US, whether such a system can last, since a large number of wealthy people, and their ideological allies, reject such a system as being legitimate and do everything in their power to dismantle such a system.

 

Nationalisation, capital controls, and incomes policies are no longer popular in the West.  On the other hand, all Western societies (even the USA) spend immense sums on public provision of health, education, and social services.  The libertarian dream, of a State spending 5-10% of GDP, is never going to be realised, because it would be just so unpopular among the voters.

I do think that rich people (and corporations) should count their blessings.  Paying even quite high taxes doesn't stop you from enjoying your wealth, whereas the kinds of societies where you pay no tax are the kinds of societies where you can get kidnapped, murdered, or thrown in jail at the whim of the rulers.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

7 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

Where did you stop beating your wife?

People advocating purely Marxist economies tend to have all sorts of excuses for why Marxist style command economies have never worked long term ignoring the underlying fact that Marxist style command economies have never worked well compared with capitalist economies or mixed captialist/socialist economies.  

[maarsen]

8 hours ago, Summer Bass said:

That's not quite right. Cuba had relatively high income per capita in Latin America and greatly improving literacy and medical access in the 1950s, although there was a big rural-urban divide on it. 

There's a really good Jacobin essay on Cuba (given that it's Jacobin, it's fair to say they're not going to have a conservative bias against it or against socialism):

Here's a longer critique of the gains in health care and literacy that Communist Cuba has made (it also makes an interesting point about how heavily dependent on Soviet subsidies Cuba was from the 1970s onward - when the Soviet Union fell, it caused an absolutely devastating economic crisis in the country). 

I will give them credit for bridging the urban-rural divide. Rural poverty and under-development wasn't just a problem in the US - before the FDR era agricultural programs and rural electrification, many US farmers were essentially living in a different century from their urban counterparts. Worldwide, doing heavy land reform was often a valuable step towards greater economic development (see South Korea, Japan, and the effort in Guatemala that was aborted by a US coup in the 1950s). 

 

It is really easy to write about Cuba but I doubt that many people, apart from Canadians, really do take the time to travel there and see the country. Per capita income means nothing if you live in a plutocracy as Cuba was under Batista. Take the lack of railways in Cuba. There is one rail line in Cuba and that was built for  the Hershey company for the transport of sugar cane, not people. The telephone system that was in existence when Castro took over was already obsolete. Infrastructure in Cuba was to facilitate sugar production  for the USA, and nothing else. There is a reason that Castro could walk in and topple Batista without any real opposition. 

[The Anti-Targ]

Interesting re shortening the working week.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12090637

Quote

The Kiwi boss who trialled giving his staff a full salary for four days' work says it was a success and that he wants it to become permanent at his Auckland company.

Andrew Barnes, the chief executive at Perpetual Guardian, says he's already made a recommendation to his board to take the policy beyond the initial eight –week trial.

"The next thing is that I need to get the board to approve the recommendations in the next few weeks," Barnes told the Herald.

During March and April, Perpetual Guardian conducted what was essentially a corporate experiment in allowing the company's 240-person staff to retain full pay as well as a three-day weekend.

Perhaps we're not at a point where every type of business can cut hours and not cut pay, but it seems some buisnesses are viable.

[Altherion]

14 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

FDR was so dominant that even many of his opponents in the Republican Party came to accept the legacy of the New Deal, even if they thought it went overboard in some respects. Dewey who ran against Trump was a relative Republican moderate who didn’t reject it.

I think you mean Truman, not Trump. Trump of the late 2010s would undoubtedly have appreciated certain aspects of Truman's Presidency ("I won the biggest war ever by using the biggest bombs ever. Nobody ever saw bombs even a tenth as big or so much winning!"), but when Dewey lost to Truman in 1948, Trump was merely a toddler.

14 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

And my first inclination is to say yes, it can be, if we make some institutional adjustments, like boosting the political clout of organized labor and by getting a handle on the corrupting influence of money on politics, or perhaps making the American system more democratic so it more closely reflects the wishes of American people.

Boosting the clout of organized labor is probably not happening -- it would have to be done artificially and it won't last. Contemporary American labor can be divided into categories a few ways, but no matter how you slice it, the fraction where organized labor can wield power is relatively small. Don't get me wrong, it exists: all sorts of government-funded jobs  (teachers, firefighters, police officers, etc.) as well as many in health care and a few other fields are powerful enough to keep their salaries growing and decent benefits... but that's close to the extent of what they can do. Workers at the higher end generally would not benefit from a union and it would not be tolerated. Workers at the lower end are mostly replaceable either by automation or by outsourcing and if they decide to unionize, they'll be made aware of this.

Getting a handle on the corrupting influence of money on politics has the same problem considered from the other side. In a capitalist system, capital is power -- to fight this trend is like swimming against the current: you might be able to manage it for a while, but the current will win in the end. Making the system more democratic is both ill-defined and difficult due to preexisting documents.

[Spring Bass]

14 hours ago, maarsen said:

It is really easy to write about Cuba but I doubt that many people, apart from Canadians, really do take the time to travel there and see the country. Per capita income means nothing if you live in a plutocracy as Cuba was under Batista. Take the lack of railways in Cuba. There is one rail line in Cuba and that was built for  the Hershey company for the transport of sugar cane, not people. The telephone system that was in existence when Castro took over was already obsolete. Infrastructure in Cuba was to facilitate sugar production  for the USA, and nothing else. There is a reason that Castro could walk in and topple Batista without any real opposition. 

That's why the essay itself points out that per capita GDP isn't the last word, and points to a couple of other measures.

If Cuba still only has one rail line, that seems like an indictment of the Castro regime - it's been nearly sixty years since the take-over. Of course, the island isn't that big (about 777 miles long by 118 miles wide), so perhaps they don't need a lot of rail line.

19 hours ago, Scott de Montevideo! said:

People advocating purely Marxist economies tend to have all sorts of excuses for why Marxist style command economies have never worked long term ignoring the underlying fact that Marxist style command economies have never worked well compared with capitalist economies or mixed captialist/socialist economies.  

Most of them disavow the Soviet Union and other authoritarian socialist regimes altogether (at least now they do). They're not entirely wrong to do so, either, since a democratic socialist set-up where people have direct and open feedback and the ability to vote the people running it out of power is something quite different from an authoritarian socialist regime like the Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact states.

Of course, you could make an argument that widespread socialism makes a society more prone to authoritarianism. Perhaps Democracy with its multiple factions and power centers (polyarchy) requires economic decentralization and polyarchy as well, so that those in power can't readily use their control of the economy to suppress rivals and build up too powerful patronage networks (sort of like what happened with the governing party under Chavez in Venezuela after 2005). But that can be contrasted with countries like Postwar France and Sweden, where the government owned vast swathes of the economy and was a major share of investment spending (but even still that was embedded in a market economy and broader international regime).

 

[OldGimletEye]

4 hours ago, Altherion said:

Boosting the clout of organized labor is probably not happening -- it would have to be done artificially and it won't last. Contemporary American labor can be divided into categories a few ways, but no matter how you slice it, the fraction where organized labor can wield power is relatively small. Don't get me wrong, it exists: all sorts of government-funded jobs  (teachers, firefighters, police officers, etc.) as well as many in health care and a few other fields are powerful enough to keep their salaries growing and decent benefits... but that's close to the extent of what they can do. Workers at the higher end generally would not benefit from a union and it would not be tolerated. Workers at the lower end are mostly replaceable either by automation or by outsourcing and if they decide to unionize, they'll be made aware of this.

Getting a handle on the corrupting influence of money on politics has the same problem considered from the other side. In a capitalist system, capital is power -- to fight this trend is like swimming against the current: you might be able to manage it for a while, but the current will win in the end. Making the system more democratic is both ill-defined and difficult due to preexisting documents.

Well, I guess the only thing left to do is to vote for Trump and just hope for the best.

Maybe he will get in there and shake things up. Now I have no idea how he'll "shake things up" (well, I did, but let's ignore that for a moment) and I have no idea how things will fall out, but fuck it, let's just roll the dice and see what happens. After all, from time to time, I do like getting drunker than fuck and then trying my luck at the craps table. Cause you know, anything could happen! And maybe I won't end up being one broke dick dog after a night of drinking like a fish and rolling the dice.

[OldGimletEye]

19 hours ago, SeanF said:

Nationalisation, capital controls, and incomes policies are no longer popular in the West.  On the other hand, all Western societies (even the USA) spend immense sums on public provision of health, education, and social services.  The libertarian dream, of a State spending 5-10% of GDP, is never going to be realised, because it would be just so unpopular among the voters.

On capital controls. Had the designers of the Euro opted for a fixed exchange rate with capital controls, perhaps Europe would be in much better shape, than the disaster created by what is known as the "Euro". Personally, I'm kind of "meh" towards them, preferring that nations keep their monetary independence. And the countries in Europe should have never given that up.

Also, if I recall correctly Rogoff and Reinhart attributed a good deal of the relative financial stability during the Bretton Woods era because of capital controls. And Rogoff and Reinhart are hardly wild eyed left wingers. And the IMF has seemingly eased up a bit on it's prior position on capital controls. So perhaps capital controls are making a bit of a comeback.

But, anyway, conservative clown buffoonery goes way beyond the issues of incomes policy, capital controls, and nationalization. It gets into things like Jeb Hensarling's horrid financial bomb act. And it gets into things like Paul "Numbers Guy" Ryan, misrepresenting other people's research and those people not exactly being happy about it.

It gets into people like Eugene Fama claiming that the economy can be described by:

MV = Py where V is stable.

It gets into people like Tyler Cowen running around saying "the economy basically follows the RBC model" except when it doesn't and it has nothing useful to say when the shit hits the fan, other than of course suggesting what we need is the usual "pro growth business friendly policies", even though nobody in their right mind thinks the source of the problem is on the supply side. But you know, that ain't gonna stop people like Newt Gringrich running around saying that only if Obama had done it just like Reagan, everything would be just awesome!

19 hours ago, SeanF said:

 The libertarian dream, of a State spending 5-10% of GDP, is never going to be realised, because it would be just so unpopular among the voters.

Certainly if these sorts of people just laid their cards out on the table, it would likely not sell.

But, these sorts of people are very, very good at not laying their cards on the table. They usually try to couch their preferred policies in terms of "fiscal responsibility" or "pro growth policies".

The old, "let us destroy your welfare state and unions and the growth will be so awesome you won't mind!" goes way back. It's an old Republican Party/ Conservative gag. And it's been around for a long time. Back, in the 1930s, FDR was pretty much right to laugh in the Republican Party's face about it.

 

[Rippounet]

12 hours ago, Altherion said:

Getting a handle on the corrupting influence of money on politics has the same problem considered from the other side. In a capitalist system, capital is power -- to fight this trend is like swimming against the current: you might be able to manage it for a while, but the current will win in the end. 

Isn't it ironic that, come to think of it, both private AND public ownership of the means of production lead to less democracy? 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

Isn't it ironic that, come to think of it, both private AND public ownership of the means of production lead to less democracy? 

Isn't part of the problem that there are competing interests when we compare political and economic needs.  There is certainly overlap but economic interests tend to favor efficiency and efficiency isn't really a prime concern in many political contexts.