I’m hanging out in the airport in Springfield, Missouri, and of course CNN is blaring on all the televisions. As is typical, it’s just one news story repeated and rehashed and gnawed over endlessly, but what is surprising is what the story is: John McCain is running a filthy, dirty, racist, hate-mongering campaign. Revere has a fine post pointing out the McCain Doctrine: all’s fair if it gets him elected.
Heck, you ought to read all of Revere’s posts in the Annals of McCain-Palin. And once you’ve felt enough disgust at this man, lighten it up with the latest Freethinker Sunday Sermonette, which this time around is an excellent example of satire.
The past eight years have shown us that it is easy to deny what you have done in the past, so by that measure, it really doesn’t matter what you do or say during the campaign.
The dirtier McCain gets, the less my Republican friends want to vote for him. Keep it up, John!
Yeah, PZ, this is getting crazy. John Lewis is being portrayed as a villain because he tried to make a point using a historical example, perhaps with the hope history doesn’t repeat itself.
And I thought I was the only one who “lost it” recently….. at least I went nuts over a 401K situation.
What *is* it that some people do *not* understand about FactCheck.org?
It seems that the man who would rather “lose an election than lose a war” is willing to lose a war, an economy and whatever portions of his dignity still remain, and he may lose the election anyway.
This man is an idiot far too willing to make things up to get elected. If he’s lying now, just wait until he gets in the White House.
The cynic in me says that the GOP has had racist tendencies for about 20 years or so, but earlier they were able to hide it well behind various innocuous code phrases. I really noticed this when Gingrich became Speaker. It appears that their code phrases no longer work as well as before on the masses, so they have to get closer to what they really mean to keep the party base rabid.
McCain does not look well, a point many have noticed. He hasn’t really been visible much lately, odd 3 weeks from a major election.
A recent poll states that 46% of the US population doesn’t believe he would make it through a first term
At 72, he is too old. By itself that might not matter but the guy has had a rough life and his health is clearly shakey. High levels of stress for long periods of time kills and IMO, he wouldn’t last all that long as president. Which leaves Palin, who is acting like she is running for president rather than vice president. Which she probably is.
“John Lewis is being portrayed as a villain because he tried to make a point using a historical example.”
Hmmm…Hillary makes a point using a historical example, and it is said that she wanted people to vote for her because Obama would be assinated. Now, this guy makes a point with a historical example, and it’s with the hope some crazy white people don’t go blowing up churches, because we all know what white people are capable of, don’t we.
Thanks for the viedo link, now I understand the vital necessity of voting for Obama! Bring on the Rapture indeed!
(Cue the choir)
“He’ll fuck you up,
Yes God will fuck you up,
If you dare to disobey His stern command”
I’ll be humming that catchy tune for days!
Thanks PZ!
IMHO, Obama’s response to the smears is awesome:
23 days to go, and things are not looking good for John McCampaign and Sarah Trailin’.
I still dont like him but he himself seems to be lightening up a bit, just the party isnt
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article4926283.ece
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/us_elections_2008/7665780.stm
watch the vid on the bbc one
While I would agree that McCain is running an increasingly dirty campaign, I’m not so sure that there’s any inherent racism in McCain’s campaign itself, just his supporters.
Annals of McCain-Palin
I’m thinking there’s one too many ‘n’s in “Annals”.
@ 5. The racism in the Republican party goes back 40 years, to Nixon. He figured out that after LBJ pushed the Civil Rights bill through it would be easy for the Republicans to pick up the racist South through the use of code words (“states’ rights”). The real parallel with McCain would be Nixon, not Wallace.
Of course, Reagan turned covert racism into a fine art by giving speeches in places like Philadelphia, Mississippi, using similar language. Philadelphia will be infamous forever for the brutal murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwermer in June 1964. Reagan giving a speech there praising states rights made it clear to bigots across Dixie that a Reagan administration would give short shrift to enforcing civil rights laws. Reagan also worked real hard at turning the face of poverty black — every time he railed against welfare he’d make sure the examples shown were black even though most poor people in this country were (and are) white, would have been perfectly willing to never spend a dime of federal money fighting AIDS (homophobic doesn’t begin to cover his attitude), and turned the government in general into the enemy.
I don’t think McCain would have ever said anything at any of his rallies if it hadn’t been for the combination of a supporter putting him on the spot with a direct question about Obama, cameras and microphones being trained on McCain at the time so he had no choice but to say the right thing, and a growing chorus of questions and complaints from the news media.
To McCain’s credit: During one of his appearances, a woman got up and accused Obama of being an “Arab”. McCain shook his head, took the mike from her, and insisted that Obama was a “fine man, a family man, with whom I have great disagreements.”
Which kind of undermines some of the nastiness of his own campaign.
@ 5. The racism in the Republican party goes back 40 years, to Nixon. He figured out that after LBJ pushed the Civil Rights bill through it would be easy for the Republicans to pick up the racist South through the use of code words (“states’ rights”). The real parallel with McCain would be Nixon, not Wallace.
Of course, Reagan turned covert racism into a fine art by giving speeches in places like Philadelphia, Mississippi, using similar language. Philadelphia will be infamous forever for the brutal murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwermer in June 1964. Reagan giving a speech there praising states rights made it clear to bigots across Dixie that a Reagan administration would give short shrift to enforcing civil rights laws. Reagan also worked real hard at turning the face of poverty black — every time he railed against welfare he’d make sure the examples shown were black even though most poor people in this country were (and are) white, would have been perfectly willing to never spend a dime of federal money fighting AIDS (homophobic doesn’t begin to cover his attitude), and turned the government in general into the enemy.
I don’t think McCain would have ever said anything at any of his rallies if it hadn’t been for the combination of a supporter putting him on the spot with a direct question about Obama, cameras and microphones being trained on McCain at the time so he had no choice but to say the right thing, and a growing chorus of questions and complaints from the news media.
And he got booed for it by his supporters.
Sorry about the double post. I have no clue how that happened.
While I agree to some extent, Scott, John McCain still chose to provide a rather gutless answer. Throughout his sad little response, he never once said that Obama wasn’t a Muslim. He could have ended this bullshit once and for all, but he didn’t. This “Obama is a Muslim” meme, and the fear behind it, is the only thing McCain has.
So yeah. While the call for sanity was a nice gesture, I doubt he was anywhere near sincere.
Which kind of undermines some of the nastiness of his own campaign.”
Are you kidding? Has no one else picked this up? McCain retorted to the accusation that Obama is Arab by stating that he is instead “a fine man”. This implicitely says that Arabs are not, fine, family men. McCain is implicitely accusing all Arabs of being indecent. The man tried to climb out of the mud only to get stuck in more mud. That’s how deep the mud the Republicans are in is.
To McCain’s credit: During one of his appearances, a woman got up and accused Obama of being an “Arab”. McCain shook his head, took the mike from her, and insisted that Obama was a “fine man, a family man, with whom I have great disagreements.”
Which kind of undermines some of the nastiness of his own campaign.
No, it doesn’t. He’s only backing off now because the mainstream media has started reporting on how rabid his supporters are getting, and he’s scared that if someone does try an actual physical attack on Obama that he’ll be blamed for it. He’s just like every other racist – he’s happy to be as vile as possible until he’s in the spotlight, then runs scared because he knows he’s not “supposed” to be like that.
Why do I fear it is only a matter of weeks until McCain and Company start talking about lynch mobs, segregation, and the Klan. (The KKK is, I think, the only hatefest that is still solidly behind McCain.)
All democrat voters should avoid polling booths in democrat-dominated areas if they can, and send in a postal/absentee vote. Just in case a republican nut-job tries to scew the vote with bullets. Also avoids ‘doctored’ voting machines.
Raven mentioned that John doesn’t look well. What happens if he does kark it between now and the election? Would Palin become the new candidate by default or can the Republicans choose someone else? If he kicks the bucket after November presumably Palin would be sworn in as President? I suppose if that happens moose will become an endangered species.
That dirty McCain! Thank the stars that PZ Myers never spreads hate for anyone or any group.
No sirreeeeeee!
You can go the the bank on that!
With apocalypse-cheerleading religious-right wackjob Sarah Palin needing only the Secretary of Defense’s agreement to order the launch of America’s nuclear arsenal (as I understand it), and with 7 or 8 other nuclear powers in the world, the endangered species list would, potentially, read “all of the above.”
Darn right, Azkyrot. Too bad those atheistic scientists (Dawkins assures us most scientists are atheists) kept providing nukes to every government with the means to obtain them.
Its kind of dumb to put guns into the hands of waring gangs.
Ben, please go back to portraying dull schoolteachers in movies. Play to your one strength.
There’s an old saying in the legal community that works equally well in the political arena, and I think it warrants mention:
“When the law is against you, argue the facts.
When the facts are against you, argue the law.
When both the law and the facts are against you, attack the opposition.”
John McCain’s campaign entered that third category right around the time Palin was chosen to fill the ticket, and she has held that banner just as high and proudly as he.
Re: the Annals of McCain-Palin:
How amazing it is to witness this sudden outburst of GOP outrage now.
Where the hell have these voices of honor and integrity been over the last umteen years as an army of jerks like Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly and Coulter whipped up a rabid lather of shock-jock-like hostility, hate-mongering and intolerance all camouflaged as patriotism?
Why, taking political advantage of the opportunity, conveniently raking in the votes from a carefully cultivated mob-mentality, that’s where.
The eggs of duplicitous hypocrisy laid by neoconservatives and their religious fundamentalist cohorts have at long last begun to hatch their rotten contents, and the stench is unbearable.
Incredibly, over a third of this country’s citizens apparently still cannot detect the smell.
The neoconservative Republican party: theirs is a legacy unprecedented as the most shameful that has ever disgraced the annals of political discourse in these United States.
Erm, it should be remembered that McCain actually said, in addressing his supporters, that Obama was a “decent family man” who no one needed to be scared of.
McCain and Obama are both, as far as I can tell, essentially good human beings who are trying to improve things. Unfortunately, they both have less palatable supporters – but is that really news? We already knew that there are some loony wingnuts who vote Republican because they think the Democrats are part of some world Arab socialist UN anti-Christian conspiracy. Likewise, the likes of Louis Farrakhan have endorsed Obama. There are extremists in both camps, but I don’t see that this reflects badly on the candidates themselves.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I agree with Obama on issues such as same-sex marriage and the educational curriculum (both, incidentally, areas where the president has very limited power), but I agree with McCain on tax policy and foreign policy (for the most part). (On healthcare I’m not impressed with either of them; McCain’s plan to eliminate the tax preference on employer healthcare schemes seems to be a step backwards, IMO, while Obama’s plan would go too far and be too expensive). They both have some good ideas and they are both people who are deserving of respect. Partisan rancour isn’t constructive.
Walton? Erm, it should also be remembered what he DIDN’T say all those many times when the lout-contingent in his audiences shouted out hateful slurs….BEFORE he realized his schtick was getting out of hand.
…and it should be remembered he also – just yesterday AFTER his more concilliatory tone – vowed to “kick his ‘you-know-what’ in the next debate.
What a swell guy.
He flips and flops with the alacrity of roasting kernals of popcorn.
True, partisan rancour isn’t constructive. McCampaign has proven that abundantly. But calling them out for shamelessly continuing to mislead Americans with lies and unsubstantiated character attacks is NOT a partisan exercise. There’s a subtle but enormous difference, and as an American citizen, you ought to know better. We should ALL know better. Yet evidently over a third of us don’t.
One thing that may seem relevant is this: would you trust a boundlessly ambitious guy who has conducted on of the most grotesquely deceitful presidential campaigns in living memory – a self-described man of action “straight-talking-maverick” who in reckless desperation and with an awesome command of cynicism – picks a clueless hocky mom from Alaska as a running mate whilst whistling that tiresome old tune about putting the country first?
THAT guy? THAT guy, with his obviously FAILING campaign, is supposed to be respected for his presidential decision-making capacity? THAT guy, who keeps insisting he knows how to do things right and has more qualificatyions and experience than anybody else in leadership?
He’s a bad joke.
What a swell guy.
True, partisan rancour isn’t constructive. McCampaign has proven that abundantly. But calling them out for continues to disgraceful tactics in the form of
Oops…a bit of a tick there. It was supposed to end at “…a bad joke.”
also, it’s “qualifications” and “…ONE of the most deceitful campaigns in living memory.”
Apologies
Highly recommended reading:
M. Kane Jeeves (Political satire blog by Ed Naha)
http://mkanejeeves.com/?p=320
—
Typical response to a commentor:
“…I saw an interview with that 75 year old woman who said Obama was an “Arab” and was corrected by McCain the other day. The woman says that Obama is an “Arab terrorist.” She works as a volunteer for McCain and sent over 300 mailers out (that day) listing some stuff about Obama that she wouldn’t repeat on camera. She’s friggin’ 75 years old and thinks he’s tainted by Muslim blood and will destroy the country…Oy.
“Another old yahoo brought a stuffed monkey to a Palin rally with an Obama sticker affixed to its head. So, the ol’ duffer is a wagging’ this monkey around and having a yee-haw ol’ time when he notices he’s being videotaped. Slowly, he lowers the monkey, removes and crumples the sticker, tossing it aside, and hands the toy monkey to a startled little boy. Ah, the courage of bigotry.
“Oh, yeah. McCain’s team sez he can’t be a bigot because when all that bigotry was going on, McCain was a POW, so he missed all that stuff. They honestly said that.
“You’ll excuse me, now. I must find a plug socket to tongue.”
[Ed Naha – who notices LOT’s of things others don’t]
IMHO the best underground political satirist in the country.
Then you are an idiot.
What has Republican fiscal policy got the US recently, apart from a global financial meltdown, having to add another digit to the national debt clock, and enriching the wealthy and impoverishing the middle class, leaving the US with the largest poverty gap in the West?
Foreign policy? What, the Bush Doctrine? That the US alone has the right to start wars of aggression because they’ve got the most nukes and aircraft carriers and nobody has the power to stop them?
All people are deserving of respect as persons, but both candidates are not deserving of equal respect as candidates.
The massive gap in their respective qualifications and achievements (which, having a giant hard-on for war and violence, presumably you still fail to acknowledge) and now the way in which they are allowing their campaigns to be run. Isn’t dog-whistle politics enough? What does it take? Does McCain himself have to call Obama “that uppity nigger” on national TV?
For those who missed it the first time around:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/06/are_you_on_this_list.php#comment-913574
SC @#35,
I wonder if he ever found the lettuce abbatoir?
This is crap. If it’s “the tawdry guilt-by-association gimmick” when it’s used against someone who actually met the candidate and introduced him onto the political scene, it would have to be even more so when it involves a random nut that the candidate might not have even heard. (The Secret Service didn’t hear him.) And I think it’s despicable to call McCain a racist because he has racist supporters.
Emmet Caulfield at #34:
The global financial meltdown cannot be blamed entirely on Republican policy; some of the blame, surely, must go to the Clinton administration, who, through the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, pressured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into giving out mortgages to anyone and everyone in order to increase home ownership rates among the urban poor? (They even required that unemployment benefit be treated as a source of income in assessing creditworthiness!) I agree that Republican policy has not been fantastic, however; Bush has replaced “tax and spend” with “borrow and spend”, and has actually increased the size of the federal government (in terms of both spending and number of employees). What America really needs is a genuine small-government libertarian who will actually reduce the size and scope of federal government and give more power and money back to the people; but there is no such candidate in the present race. Economically, McCain is the lesser of two evils. (Also, given his protectionist rhetoric in the Democratic primaries, I’m very concerned that Obama would be amenable to introducing tariff protectionism in order to “protect American jobs”, which would be bad in the long run for both America and the world. Global free trade is the source of much of today’s prosperity; let’s not throw the baby out with the bath-water.)
It seems to me that inefficient and bloated government, in fact, is the source of a lot of America’s problems. A point that is often missed is that, when federal, state and local spending are all counted, America’s public-sector spending as a percentage of GDP is similar to that of most European social democracies. The US federal government alone even spends more on healthcare per capita ($2,700 in 2004) than other OECD countries – for less return, seemingly.
As I have pointed out on other threads, economic history – the success stories of Hong Kong and Singapore, the massive growth of Ireland’s economy in recent years following free market reforms, the 10-15% GDP growth rates regularly sustained by post-Soviet economies such as Estonia which are busy privatising infrastructure and cutting taxes – show that a capitalist free-market economy works, in delivering prosperity and greater human development. Inequality of wealth is a side effect, but I don’t see this as a problem. Wealth is not a zero-sum game; the fact that the wealthy are getting wealthier does not mean the poor are getting poorer. The only measure of poverty which is relevant is that of absolute poverty – and countries with a low-tax, free-market economy consistently have lower levels of absolute poverty than other nations.
This is why I prefer McCain’s economic policy, marginally, to that of Obama. I am very concerned about Obama’s tax plan; he plans to let the Bush tax cuts expire (replacing them with bigger cuts for lower income-earners), which will mean higher marginal tax rates as high as 50%. McCain’s plan is not perfect – I don’t want to see more national debt, and I would rather see a commitment to massive cuts in federal spending – but I trust him with the US economy (which, of course, affects the economy of every nation on earth, in today’s globalised world) far more than I trust Obama.
Evidently not, since he’s back here.
Emmet’s referring to his hilarious comment:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/06/this_is_how_obama_could_make_m.php#comment-929310
(Hate to gush, but I still remember that as one of the funniest lines I’ve read here. Also glad I searched for it – seeing my own comment right above reminded me that Walton also has his doubts about evolution. Really doesn’t get any better for him when you delve back into those past threads, does it?)
Ah, where are all the Pinochets these days…?
…Walton also has his doubts about evolution…
Where the hell did I say that? If I implied it, then it wasn’t my intention. I am not a biologist, and have just enough knowledge to be keenly aware of my own ignorance on the subject. As far as I can tell from the empirical data and the scientific consensus, there is very strong evidence in favour of evolution, and none that I am aware of in favour of “intelligent design” or creationism of any type.
I have never advocated that creationism should be arbitrarily given “equal time” in schools, or treated as if it were part of modern science. It is not science (as confirmed by court rulings as well as the overwhelming view of the scientific community). It should be taught in classes on religion and philosophy, certainly, but it does not belong in science lessons. So I am no creationist and I object to being painted as such.
However, if, in a hypothetical election, candidate A supports teaching creationism in schools but also supports tax cuts, free market economics and privatisation, whereas candidate B opposes creationism but supports socialism, big government, “redistribution of wealth” (naked theft), rigid labour market restrictions and more state ownership of industry, then I would support candidate A. (This dichotomy never happens in the UK, by the way, where there’s almost no support for creationism. But I’m given to understand it’s quite common in the US.) The state of the economy – on which millions of ordinary people’s jobs and livelihoods rest – is always more important than teaching good science in schools. I realise I’m not going to make myself popular saying that to a forum full of scientists, but it’s what I think. However strong our principles, we all have to make sacrifices and compromises.
What you said was that you “accept the probable reality of biological evolution,” the “probable” implying that you’re not fully sold on the theory. I directed you to the specific comment above @ #39, so it’s a bit lazy of you to fire back with “Where the hell did I say that?” rather than seeking to explain or justify the earlier remark.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/06/this_is_how_obama_could_make_m.php#comment-929231
It can fairly firmly be blamed on lack of appropriate regulation in the face of the willingness of both lenders and borrowers to behave irresponsibly.
Under Clinton, the national debt went up about 25%; under Bush, it went up 100%. Case closed.
Oh my FSM, you haven’t fallen for that fairy story as well, have you? I suppose you want the US to go back to a gold standard as well?
The truth about the “Celtic Tiger” is that Ireland’s economy at the beginning of the 1990’s was tiny. By reducing corporation tax to 10% (now 12.5%), the Irish government was able to attract foreign direct investment (mostly from the US) year-on-year that was a significant fraction of GDP. Using favourable transfer-pricing, international corporations were able to concentrate their profits in Ireland, where taxes were lowest, artificially inflating GDP, but not growing GNP at nearly the same rate (Ireland’s ratio of GDP/GNP is huge). Intel building a single silicon fab for $10bn massively boosted GDP, that would not have been true for an economy the size of the US. What worked for Ireland only worked because Ireland is a very small country. The same policy simply cannot work for a much larger economy because there isn’t enough international capital to have a significant effect. In a nutshell, pour $40bn into a $40bn economy and you double it. Pour $40bn into the US economy and it makes no difference. The idea that the Celtic Tiger was due to some super enlightened right-wing fiscal policy is simply bullshit of the greatest smelliness. It was mostly dumb luck.
Another tinker-toy economy that can grow massively as a result of amounts of capital that are considered loose change on Wall Street.
Then, surely, as the most vociferous international proponents of this policy, the US would be the greatest beneficiaries, with the highest HDI, yet the crown belongs to economies with higher levels of regulation.
Another staggeringly naïve statement. McCain is in thrall to the same oligarchs as Bush, he will do nothing to benefit anyone but them, and the ordinary American will suffer once more. Obama might be different. Maybe. Fingers crossed.
here, corrected it for you :
What America really needs is a genuine small-government libertarian who will actually reduce the size and scope of federal government and give even more power and money
back to the peopleto the owners of capital.To SC at #42: I added the proviso “probable” because, as I said, I’m not a biologist, I don’t have much of a personal interest in that area of study, and I don’t know enough of the facts or the theory to have a meaningful categorical opinion. However, as I said, I’m not a creationist and I object in the strongest terms to being pigeonholed as one.
To Emmet Caulfield. I see what you’re saying about the relevance of a country’s size; and it’s absolutely true that Estonia, for instance, achieves very high levels of growth partly because it started from such a low base. But the point is, capitalism has consistently shown itself superior to socialism. Look at Chile, which has a higher HDI and a consistently higher-performing economy than its Latin American neighbours. During the Allende government, before the free-market reforms which were introduced under Pinochet, inflation was in the thousands of percent and the Chilean economy was a total disaster. (Don’t get me wrong; I’m not endorsing Pinochet’s political methods. He murdered a lot of people. But saying “Pinochet supported capitalism, Pinochet was bad, ergo capitalism is bad” is a logical fallacy, and is as silly as saying “Mao was an atheist, Mao was bad, ergo atheism is bad”.) Similarly, the UK economy was in a terrible state in the 1970s, largely due to top marginal tax rates of 90% and a huge, bloated government bureaucracy with nationalised industries. Mrs Thatcher changed all that, revitalising Britain’s entrepreneurial culture, and we now enjoy the benefits of a relatively strong macro-economic trend.
I don’t deny that regulation is important; indeed, it is vital to ensure a genuinely free market, and to prevent the formation of corrupt cartels. And I agree with you that the US political system, in which big business can tie the hands of regulators via the system of lobbyists and influence peddling, often leads to “crony capitalism” and a situation in which fair regulation and a free market are sacrificed in favour of the interests of a clique of large corporations. (Being pro-market is not the same as being uncritically pro-big business; it’s time some American conservatives learned that.) But the only way to resolve that is systemic campaign finance reform, in order to eliminate influence-peddling by lobbyists – and guess which senator co-sponsored the biggest campaign finance reform bill in thirty years? A certain John McCain.
I don’t know if any of you have read the Rolling Stone article on John McCain:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/make_believe_maverick_the_real_john_mccain
if not, then I would suggest that you do so.
Now a lot of people criticise McCain because nearly every sentence he utters has the words “My Friends” in it. But the one thing that really pisses me off is the widespread use of the term “The Folks” by US politicians.
The use of this term epitomises the thinking of “us” (the politicians and their narrow circle of privileged access) and “them” the unwashed masses.
Where did the phrase “My Fellow Citizens” go and when was that banned from public political discourse? Never mind that the phrase “The People” would be too fatal a reminder to those in Washington that the US Constitution starts of with three words writ large and they are “We the People”.
The reason why these phrases are not used is because it would point to the fact that politicians are public servants, and not – as they have displayed themselves to be – public masters.
There was much ado about the fired US Attorneys serving “at the pleasure of the President. Well the President and every other elected official serves “at the pleasure of The People”.
Bat Masterson (yep the gun-slinger) once said, “Everything in life evens out, take for instance ice. The rich get their ice in Summer and the poor get their ice in Winter.”
In the US and also elsewhere (I’m German and live in the UK at the moment) the “Fourth Estate” has atrophied to the point where it has become the real estate of the rich.
But now in the Winter of our discontent, a new Fourth Estate is emerging PZ, Kos, Amato and many others in the US are showing that the phrase “We the People” is still a viable entity and that this new entity is no longer willing to deliver the ice in Summer and is well on the way to extending the ice for everyone else at least into Spring.
But purely capitalist economies (ie US) have not consistently shown that they were superior to mixed economies (ie W.Europe).
When are you going to integrate in your brain, Walton, that the choice is not between extreme capitalism and extreme socialism, but between extreme capitalism (the anglo-saxon model) which is by now clearly showing its failure and mixed economies which maybe do not provide such high growth, but sustainable one and less risk for its people, where some chunks of the economy are socialised (healthcare, banking, energy, education : the basic needs of all people) and others are based on free market capitalism.
Read this article, and please come back and comment it :
http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/making-bail/2008/10/06/name-economy
SC,
Oh, no, please do :o)
Walton,
I agree with a lot of your explanation, but I simply can’t reconcile your explanations with your conclusions. You acknowledge the need for regulation, but you support people who have presided over catastrophic deregulation (Republicans) or are idealogically opposed to regulation (Libertarians). You acknowledge that Ireland and Estonia are inappropriate examples of the success of free-market economics due to their small size, yet you offer Ireland and Estonia as examples of the success of free-market economics. You say that you oppose cronyism and corrupt cartels, yet you offer Pinochet’s Chile as an example of the success of free-market economics. Inflation is an economic metric, it is not an end in itself. The objective should be the happiness, health, freedom, and security of the people. I wonder if the average Chilean would agree with your praise of Pinochet? Personally, I’d rather have inflation than death squads, but that’s just me.
McCain’s campaign finance has been very shady indeed. He managed the primaries on a shoestring, true, while spouting off about campaign finance reform, but ever since the scandal over using FEC funding as collateral for a loan, and accepting money from the extreme right, he’s in the pockets of the same oligarchs and religious nutbags as Bush, and it’s “business as usual” on Capitol Hill. The wheels fell off the McCain “campaign finance reform” bandwagon a long time ago. That you are still flogging that dead horse means you’re either very out-of-date or being disingenuous. Proof positive of McCain’s bizarre two-faced approach is the TV interview where he attempted to take credit for getting the bailout bill through, after $150bn of earmarks were added to secure the Republican vote, then said that the president should veto bills with earmarks. Staggering dishonesty from the straight-shooting maverick.
EC: The objective should be the happiness, health, freedom, and security of the people. I wonder if the average Chilean would agree with your praise of Pinochet? Personally, I’d rather have inflation than death squads, but that’s just me.
About 30% would – the same as the 30% in the US that will follow the right directly to hell. 30% think that Pinochet is Satan incarnate and the rest wish that both the radical right and the radical left would drop off into the Humboldt. They’ve been trying to set up Antarctic towns to which they could exile them ;) (At least I think that’s the explanation).
Chile has huge social tensions. As long as high-growth rates continue, everything will be fine — folks can go to the mega-malls and the kids can focus on their fashion tribes (a really strange social phenomena). But underneath it, there are seething skinheads (another absurd social phenomena in a mestizo nation), Pinochetistas who are as insane as an American libertarian (with much of the same talking points), impoverished schools, and an expanding desert threatening people’s health and economic welfare.
But then, we’re seeing some seething social stress here in the States as well — but everyone keeps on looking the other way and pretending it’s not there. It takes a hell of a lot of ipods to keep folks busy in the long term.
Well, I object in the strongest possible terms to being accused of pigeonholing you as a creationist. I never did any such thing. I pointed to a comment of mine in which I had quoted directly from your own comment, which appeared to express doubts about evolution. You’re not a biologist so you don’t think you can tke a stand on evolution. Yet you’re also not a historian, political scientist, or sociologist, and it doesn’t stop you from making pronouncements in those areas, or regurgitating those of ignorant pundits.
Here’s more about the Chilean “Miracle”:
http://www.counterpunch.org/leight12282004.html
http://www.gregpalast.com/tinker-bell-pinochet-and-the-fairy-tale-miracle-of-chile-2/
Anyway, for fuck’s sake, the original article I posted on the other threads was not primarily about Pinochet or his policies, but about the forces outside of Chile that were behind and in support of those policies. Friedman and Hayek and their drones developed and championed them, and celebrated Pinochet on the international stage. They didn’t chastise him for mass torture and murder; they saw this as necessary to their revolutionary project and reworked their definition of political freedom to suit this project of social engineering. You cannot reject Pinochet’s political acts in one breath and cheer his alleged economic successes in the next. They are of a piece. And you can’t ignore Friedman and Hayek in this equation. Do you condemn their views and support of Pinochet, and if so do you think this has implications for your economic ideology? Or are you arguing that you have to break some eggs…?
As for “free markets” bringing prosperity and well-being, as others have shown, the statistics do not support your argument. But even granting that you can find national “free-market” economies that are successful at any given moment by whatever measure, you are simply ignoring the fact that what we’ve had for centuries is not a conglomeration of distinct economic entities but a capitalist world system. At any moment, some countries or regions (or cities) will be doing better than others for a variety of reasons.* Fortunes rise and fall. Overall, however, the system tends toward greater inequality both across and within countries, greater concentration of wealth (and therefore of political power), and ultimately widespread poverty. As capitalism lurches from one inevitable crisis to the next, concentration and inequality increase. The Cold War was a brief, anomalous era in capitalist history in that political considerations gave power to efforts to “save capitalism from itself.” But capitalism always pushed against them (Bretton Woods was already on shaky ground with the emergence of the euromarkets in the ’50s). With the end of the Cold War, efforts to save capitalism from itself have less traction, and we are returning to the state of affairs a century ago. [I don’t disagree with others here that mixed economies are worlds better than what you’re advocating, although I don’t agree with that as a model, either, since 1) I believe people should have direct democratic control over economic production, 2) the mixed economies of Europe are also based on the exploitation of those in the Global South, and 3) they don’t provide a bulwark against the pressures of global capitalism, which will eventually break them down.]
As for relative and absolute poverty, these also need to be considered from a global-systemic perspective. The people who grow the food and make the goods you buy and use are not generally in your country, but in places like China, Haiti, and Guatemala. Many of them suffer absolute poverty and also live in police-state conditions in their work. “Free markets” for them – imposed by the IMF with the complicity of their governments or not – have meant neoliberal regimes of dismantling of essential public services, “free-trade” zones from which they see no benefits, and sweatshop jobs under 24-hour guard. (This is no surprise, as the history of capitalism has been the history of theft and the maintenance of existing relations through coercion and force.)
Freedom should mean being able to choose your own economic system and not to have it dictated to you. Why do you think neoliberal policies are so reviled across Central and South America and bring protests around the world? Why do you think Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez were elected, and have been supported by huge numbers of people? No one forced people to do this, or to elect Aristide in Haiti, but the US government will kidnap democratically-elected leaders (Aristide), support military coups against them (Chávez), and foment political violence in collusion with local elites (Bolivia) in an effort to protect its and its corporations’ interests. Why would this be necessary, if neoliberalism is so great? Why did Allende have to be taken out and replaced with a dictator, if this is the kind of system people really want?
Also, there are people in the US living in serious poverty. With the current crisis (and especially if McCain becomes president), people may sink to levels we haven’t seen in this country for decades. Absolute poverty. It is not at all unthinkable, and that’s the direction we’re headed unless there’s a change.
*I’ve always liked Eduardo Galeano’s comment on these statistics (I’m paraphrasing): “Who makes this Per Capita Income? I’d like to meet him.”
And stop talking about capitalism as though it’s about little farmers’ markets or mom&pop general stores. No one’s buying it. Capitalism is about transnational corporations and banks, and an increasingly small handful of them at that. There’s nothing democratic about governments selling or giving public resources to them or about taking away any public power to control their actions. You support a “firm stance” in the so-called War on Terror, which in practice has meant the violation of basic rights and freedoms. You are not for freedom for people, or anything resembling it.
And don’t even get me started on “free markets” and the environment, especially since Nick Gotts has made that case very strongly already.
Indeed. Every country seems to have some turkeys who’ll vote for Christmas.
I’d never heard that before. I like it.
SC: Why did Allende have to be taken out and replaced with a dictator, if this is the kind of system people really want?
Allende only won a plurality. He did not have a mandate for revolution. If he’d stuck with land reform, he could have kept a broad base of support, but he followed the endless cycle in Chilean history of populists overplaying their hand, leading to an anti-democratic take-over, leading a generation later to the return of representative democracy.
Yes, the US was a bad guy in the play. But the play was primarily a Chilean play, driven by Chilean history and Chilean actors. Down to the suicide in La Moneda – a replay of Balmaceda, I believe.
Some things are local. Chile has it’s own crosses to bear on all sides, and the Allende administration was a mess without sufficient popular support for the wide-spread take over of small-scale businesses that happened towards the end.
SC,
Looks like right now, it’s going to be the other way round… It’s the pressures of social welfare that are going to break down global capitalism, simply because in the end, humans do realise that they’d rather trade off more useless consumption at credit against reduction of risks.
Look, this crisis is before all one of deleveraging, the world wants above all a huge reduction of risks, therefore reduction of debt, less growth, but sustainable growth. The transition period, that of deleveraging is going to be very painful, but that’s an unavoidable consequence of the excesses of the past. The entire world is going to enter into a global recession. If it lasts more than 2 years, which is still unclear (it will depend on how stupid or intelligent our governments are, if they make the mistake of trying to stimulate consumer demand like BushMcCain rather than investing on huge infrastrucure and innovative projects like Obama), we will then have a global depression and then violence and civil wars. In any case, this is going to be a fundamental discontinuity, because what will come out of it is a world that will not tolerate anymore such high risks. Growth will not be the key instrument, but sustainable growth, and that is something free market capitalism has no idea how to regulate.
NE: It’s the pressures of social welfare that are going to break down global capitalism, simply because in the end, humans do realise that they’d rather trade off more useless consumption at credit against reduction of risks.
It seems to me that the underlying problem is the same one that’s been around for a century — that capitalism is great at increasing production, but at the same time increases inequality which destroys demand. “Social welfare” is one reasonable response — increasing equality to the point that there is sufficient stable demand for the goods being produced.
The stability of the system depends on a sufficiently strong counter-weight to capital movement for the long-term health of markets. But the mechanisms of democracy haven’t really improved, while the movements of accountacy have exploded.
The only good tool that I’ve seen develop is the open source model — but software is a tiny fraction of production, and progressives don’t seem to take an interest in the nuts-and-bolts of problems in that way; but then, it may just be my own ignorance.
There also has to be some redress of the notion of “national debt”. I wonder what it actually means any more, if anything. It seems to have lost all connection with the normal idea of debt as something which has to be repaid at some point in the future. There is no way in hell the US is ever going to repay 10T$ in debt, nor is any country in Western Europe realistically going to arrive at any point in the foreseeable future at a situation where their national debt will be repaid. In practice, “national debt” seems to mean “amount of money the government may pull out of their own ass without the international financial markets going apeshit”, this is tacitly admitted by talking about “limiting the growth” of the national debt rather than reducing or eliminating it.
frog,
The history of interference of the US government and US corporations in Latin American politics, including coups and including this one, makes it impossible, it seems to me, to attribute such events primarily or entirely to “internal” politics, whatever this might mean in a globalized world. Just as there are strong “internal” forces in Bolivia now arrayed against Morales and the social movements supporting him (which also have transnational links), whatever happens with Bolivian politics cannot be viewed from a narrow national perspective.*
I suspected that someone would take issue with that statement. I’ve always wondered why, while people generally recognize the role of the US government in shaping the politics of other countries (Guatemala, Haiti, Iran,…) they often resist it in the Chilean case. But in any event, even if the major players were internal actors, that does not prove that Allende “overplayed his hand,” that this caused him to lose support, or (much less) that this is what brought about the anti-democratic takeover. (I mean, he wasn’t voted out of office; even extremely popular leaders can be overthrown undemocratically.) This history – which I hear with regard to Chile but not really other countries in the region – sounds more like a canned line of argumentation that people have been led to accept. Makes me think of this film:
http://icarusfilms.com/new97/chile__ob.html
I don’t have any of my materials here related to the case, though :(, so I can’t really back up my alternative interpretation of events.
*By the way, this just in:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10547
SC, with all due respect, I cannot understand how anyone, looking at the economic history of the world, can really make assertions such as those that you’ve made. (In contrast, Emmet Caulfield and frog, while I disagree with many of their views, have made an argument which I can understand and respect. I can understand those who advocate social democracy and a mixed economy; I cannot understand those who – in this day and age, and seeing the mess it invariably causes – still advocate socialism.)
Many of them [people in industrialising countries] suffer absolute poverty and also live in police-state conditions in their work. “Free markets” for them – imposed by the IMF with the complicity of their governments or not – have meant neoliberal regimes of dismantling of essential public services, “free-trade” zones from which they see no benefits, and sweatshop jobs under 24-hour guard. (This is no surprise, as the history of capitalism has been the history of theft and the maintenance of existing relations through coercion and force.)
Total and utter nonsense. Yes, it is true that a country which has recently opened up its markets, and is in the process of industrialisation, invariably goes through a stage where many of its people work in low-paid manufacturing jobs in poor conditions. Businesses relocate from wealthier countries to poorer ones so as to reduce their wage bills and overheads. What then happens is that the demand for labour in the newly-industrialised country goes up, pushing up wages. There are new entrepreneurial opportunities, and people whose family have always been subsistence farmers – with no economic opportunity – have, for the first time, a chance to make money for themselves and provide for their kids. And by the next generation, their kids are getting an education and have opportunities to reach management positions. Eventually, the country transforms into a developed country with a stronger economy. This isn’t just a theory: it happened in Taiwan, it happened in South Korea, it happened in Singapore, and it is in the process of happening in parts of China and India. The standard of living in China for millions of people is not great; but it is rapidly improving for many, because an industrial economy provides more opportunity than does one based on subsistence farming.
As to your excoriation of free trade zones: one of the things which keeps farmers in the Third World poor, and working at subsistence level, is the system of agricultural tariffs and subsidies put in place by the US and EU governments, which make it impossible for Third World agricultural exporters to compete on equal terms in US and EU markets. In other words, it is government protectionism in favour of domestic interests, not capitalism, which is creating more poverty. Free trade zones are ultimately good for everyone; by promoting competition, they force industries in all countries to become more efficient in order to compete, therefore driving down the prices of consumer goods. Protectionism is always, in all circumstances, a bad idea.
The other major cause of Third World poverty is political instability. International business is not going to invest in a country if it is prone to violence and civil wars, if its legal system does not protect property rights and contracts, and if it does not have a stable currency. They are especially not going to invest in a country such as Venezuela, where Chavez’s authoritarian socialist government is happy to expropriate foreign-owned business property, where the judicial system is corrupt and politicised, and freedom of trade is rapidly diminishing.
In sum: if every country in the world had a stable system of government with an efficient legal system and strong currency, and there was universal free movement of goods, capital and labour across boundaries and full international free trade, Third World poverty would soon be a thing of the past. Capitalism is not “exploitative”. Rather, it is the perfect expression of freedom and the most effective road to prosperity.
Indeed. And if there were any doubt, note that newly minted Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman has this to say about the two candidates’ relative merits:
Note that Krugman, though a famous liberal (by U.S. standards, that is… for the benefit of the honest-to-FSM European liberals in this crowd), is hardly an Obamamaniac: He hard some sharp criticisms of Obama during the nomination campaign and (IIRC) supported Clinton. Nevertheless, Krugman finds Obama well informed and sensible and McCain frightening.
Oddly, when it comes to our economic future, I give Mr. Krugman’s opinion a bit more weight than Walton’s. Go figure, eh?
I think we may be talking about different timescales. My broader point is that ultimately it matters not what “the world” wants or what tradeoffs rational people are willing to make or whether people want to live in a less risky world (despite incessant propaganda extolling the “freedom” afforded by risk-taking and insecurity) or whether Keynesian welfare states or systems of financial regulation provide a better or more stable environment for capitalism.
All of these can be true, and the same forces within capitalism that broke down the regime of accumulation that characterized the Cold War era – despite strong opposing political factors – will prevail in the end. Even to the extent that the political will is there and it’s politically possible to put/keep in place regulatory frameworks and social safety nets, these are only a temporary imposition. They will be evaded, undermined, and overcome by capitalism. (And putting in place such mechanisms will not in any way spell the end of global capitalism – it will simply allow it to continue in a superficially modified form.)
I’m under no illusions about what Democratic/social-democratic governments can do. They can only prevent more suffering in the present and create a (relatively) more hospitable environment for the growth of transformative movements until the rightists return to power. They will not modify capitalism in any fundamental way. The only thing that can stop the capitalist juggernaut is a radical transformation – political, economic, and social.
Unfortunately, Walton, you have fallen for the global labour Ponzi scheme. It is superficially appealing, but it fails because there is not, in fact, a limitless supply of cheap labour at the bottom of the pyramid. The rich countries in the West are on top of the pyramid, and a few poor countries, indeed, joined the scheme early enough to rise to a level in the pyramid where they have benefited, but the enduring reality of global capitalism has been the wholesale theft of the resources, natural and human, of poorer countries by richer ones and the demonisation, subversion, and/or assassination by the US of those leaders, who, like Chavez, would not join the scheme.
Walton:
Wow. I mean, just… wow.
If I’m translating correctly, you’ve just said that if you could magically wave your arms and make conditions everywhere instantaneously and simultaneously perfect for capitalism, then capitalism would be perfect.
D’Oh! Why didn’t I think of that?? [Waves arms.] Hmm… nothing seems to be happening….
Seriously, though, the whole point is that the world is imperfect. If you could whistle up the ideal initial conditions, lots of different economic models might work, but (as an old friend of mine used to say) “things being as they are, rather than as they should be,” we must deal with the world as it is. Which is to say, things need to be managed, because initial conditions are not perfect, and not everybody has pure (however you define that word) motives.
Now, a managed society may sound to you like something less than a “perfect expression of freedom,” but ask yourself whether it’s truly preferable to have theoretically “perfect” freedom that people can’t actually exercise because of their poverty or ignorance or oppression… or shouldn’t we be working for a sort of functional freedom that, while perhaps less theoretically perfect, nevertheless actually benefits the greatest number of people to the greatest extent?
Does your concept of freedom include freedom from want? Freedom from fear? If not, please explain to me how people whose lives are constricted by want and fear can consider themselves “free”?
If I’m translating correctly, you’ve just said that if you could magically wave your arms and make conditions everywhere instantaneously and simultaneously perfect for capitalism, then capitalism would be perfect. – You’re not entirely translating correctly. I am not contending that a change in the nature of humanity itself would be needed; indeed, capitalism’s success lies in the fact that it takes account of the flaws in human nature. Rather, I am pointing out that if every country had the same stable legal institutions that exist in Western countries, and all trade barriers were torn down – both of which are conceivably achievable goals, albeit a long way off – then the difference between the “First World” and “Third World” would disappear within a few generations. The success stories of Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, etc. – all countries which fifty years ago were impoverished and reliant on subsistence farming – demonstrate that capitalism is not exploitative, nor does it somehow cause world poverty. Rather, world poverty is caused by a lack of capitalism, because capitalism cannot flourish without political and legal stability.
Well, in practice, it does look like when it goes beyond $100,000 per household, financial markets do go apeshit…
Clinton 1 Jan 93 : $ 4.2 trillion
Clinton 2 Jan 97 : $ 5.3 trillion : +1.1
Clinton 2 Jan 01 : $ 5.7 trillion : +0.4
Bush 1 Jan 01 : $ 5.7 trillion
Bush 2 Jan 05 : $ 7.6 trillion : +1.9
Bush 2 Oct 08 : $10.3 trillion : +2.7 (not finished yet !)
In much the same way as HIV is caused by lack of unprotected passive anal sex with IV-drug-using hæmophiliac gay prostitutes from Swaziland.
Whatever will I do if Walton doesn’t respect me? Someone who loves Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Fallwell (or does he just respect the strength of his beliefs? – I can’t remember) doesn’t understand how I could reject capitalism! Anyway, you’re confused. Nick Gotts is a socialist. I am an anarchist.
I have also been studying the economic history of the world for almost as long as you’ve been alive, Walton. And Nick Gotts for longer. You do not possess sufficient knowledge to make such a statement.
Was there an argument there that I missed?
There is no such thing as an industrializing country or a progressive scale of industrialization. Stop trying to force history into your illegiimate, self-serving teleology, and do not put words in my mouth.
Again, absurd teleology. These countries have been part of the world system for centuries. They are not new to it. Your idea of “stages” is flatly contradicted by all evidence. You sound like a good Communist when you talk about them, though, which is amusing, if sad. You also resemble a Communist in that you appear perfectly willing to subject other people to such conditions in pursuit of your ideological ends, or consent to others doing so. Because in the gleaming future they’ll be shiny happy people!
Yes, if you can pay people 25 cents a day and they live somewhere the government will support you in controlling them and not allowing them to fight for higher wages by denying union rights it will reduce your overhead.
You need to study these countries and how people live there, rather than parroting neoliberal talking points.
You also have some absurd impressions about the history and present of agriculture and agricultural labor in these countries, their connection to global “markets,” and the forces driving people off of their land and into the industrial workforce (or sex trade, as the case may be).
Again with the teleology. Like good little Marxists.
I won’t even bother with your industrial (which somehow necessarily equals capitalist in your mind) / subsistence farming dichotomy. Your understanding of the history of agriculture doesn’t appear to be at a level at which these issues can be discussed.
However (and somewhat related to this), you have not addressed my earlier point about the global system and the fact that you can point to some country, region, or city at any given point in time and call it an economic miracle, attributing this to the cause of your choice (and did you read the articles about Chile?). This doesn’t negate the overall mechanisms or tendencies of global capitalism, the contours of which have become clear over the past centuries.
I was referring to the workers in export-proceesing zones (perhaps I should have been more clear). It is part of the propaganda when these are set up that they will bring revenues to the country (I don’t think anyone believes this these days, since it’s so evident whom they are set up to benefit). Of course, because countries are competing in the global race to the bottom, they have to lure corporations with no or lower taxes and more perks. The people who work in them do not just work in bad conditions – they have virtually (or not even virtually) no rights, and certainly no union rights. And if they do rebel at all, the companies will bring in workers from other countries who they think will be more docile and work for less. So much for helping local people or local economies.
Interesting political conditions: stability and property rights. Nothing about basic human rights. When it comes to operating in countries to steal natural resources and use forced labor, capitalist enterprises are more than happy to do so under any political conditions save those that might threaten their profits. In fact, this expropriation and exploitation has been one of the primary causes of political conflict. Their love of these conditions has shaped the sorts of governments they support. Here’s an illustration of the conditions suitable for business:
*snort* Actually, though, I’ll take the free – totally free – movement of labor. We’ll do the rest ourselves.
More argument by assertion. So I guess there won’t be any response forthcoming about Friedman-Hayek-Pinochet, then? Or about my pointing to the rejection of the system you champion by people around the world, such that many are willing to die to fight against it? Do you think that if people in other countries (or your own) disagree with you about the “perfect expression of freedom” that they should be able to seek their own path without interference from corporations, or from your government or military (or the US’s)?
But capitalism HAS been modified in a fundamental way : the largest economy in the world (28% of its GDP), the one that had always refused any form of mixed economy socialism/free markets for the last 60 years and had always heralded the wonderful merits of free market capitalism, the USA will now be forced to adopt socialism for some chunks of its economy (healthcare, banking, electricity, transports, higher education,…). It will be the only choice it has to get out of this crisis.
Once the USA will have tried, it will stick to this model, as W.Europe did. Sure, you will have alternances between right and left, because finding the perfect equilibrum in a mixed economy is not easy. But you won’t have anymore this myth that existed in the USA only, that free markets are the solution for everything.
So, radical transformation ? I think it’s already pretty radical if the USA finally ends up tasting some form of socialism…
Oh, for sure they’ll have to change the name, “socialism” they’ll never accept it, they’ll find a clever one.
SC: I suspected that someone would take issue with that statement. I’ve always wondered why, while people generally recognize the role of the US government in shaping the politics of other countries (Guatemala, Haiti, Iran,…) they often resist it in the Chilean case. But in any event, even if the major players were internal actors, that does not prove that Allende “overplayed his hand,” that this caused him to lose support, or (much less) that this is what brought about the anti-democratic takeover. (I mean, he wasn’t voted out of office; even extremely popular leaders can be overthrown undemocratically.) This history – which I hear with regard to Chile but not really other countries in the region – sounds more like a canned line of argumentation that people have been led to accept.
Well, first it’s what many Chileans believe; second it reflects the events on the ground. The fall of Allende wasn’t from a purge-list turned over by the US, or direct military intervention.
The US was limited in that case to giving the green light to political assassinations and trying to destabilize the economy, but the major spur to the coup was massive protests in Santiago against Allende. Housewives beat pots & pans against Allende. As I said, in the first place his election was a three-way race which did not give him a mandate for the depth of change he instituted.
Allende lost the middle-class, the very skilled workers that make an economy go. There’s not much question of that historically — just ask Chileans of that generation and that class. The very people who despise Pinochet (who was appointed to head the military by Allende) also despised Allende (who himself was of that class).
I don’t know the detailed history of other Latin American nations; but the Allende victory/Pinochet coup fits into a cyclical pattern in Chilean history going back to the revolution, with a periodicity of about 50 years. When folks say that Chile had 200 years of stable democracy, they’re just repeating Chilean patriotic claptrap on the scale with Americans who believe that the US is a shining beacon of Democracy.
I don’t doubt that the US pushed Chile — but Chile had already decided to jump on its own. I don’t doubt that the US made the situation worse, but it was already quite bad.
Chilean history is a struggle over control of the state between the modern, technocratic middle-class and the old Basque creole oligarchy from the colonial period. The same story happens over and over, with the working class taking the brunt of each counter-revolution when the oligarchs retake control. It’s only now, with the extended control of Lagos/Bachelet that the technocratic class really appears to have destroyed the old oligarchs (with many of them replacing the old guard at the top, while the rest of the middle class sinks. Remind anyone of any other countries?).
You can see it particularly because it is the Socialist proteges of Allende (such as Bachelet) who have implemented the neo-liberal economic policies of the last 20 years. Chile is a textbook example of oligarchs/middle-class/lower-class struggle, clearer than most other countries because of the ethnic homogeneity of the country.
Fixed it.
It seems to me that unfettered capitalism’s “success” (i.e., success only from the narrow POV of those who control the majority of the capital) lies in the fact that it exploits the flaws in human nature; the success (as measured by the general good of the people) of managed capitalism in a mixed economy is that it corrects for the flaws in human nature. I still say the preconditions in your previous post amount to trying to wave away the flaws in human nature.
If your benchmark for “First World” is the U.S. economy (ca. 2008 and et seq., if we don’t change direction in this election), I’m not sure how great a blessing that would be. To be sure, people in grinding poverty would jump at the chance to change places with you or me… but once they achieved the lofty perch of “First World” American prosperity, they might be somewhat dismayed at the economic ceilings they faced, and at the trendlines. All of which is a big part of why I, for one, will vote to change our course (not as radically as I’d like, but it’s a big “ship” with a lot of momentum).
Well, have you lived in any of those places? I spent a year in Korea in the mid 1980s, which was the midst of their transition (e.g., my American boss there had been in Seoul as a Peace Corps volunteer only 10 years previously), and what was going on there was the polar opposite of laissez faire capitalism. The highly authoritarian government might have looked right-wing, but the totally centrally controlled economy would’ve made Western conservatives faint dead away.
All is not always as it seems from across the ocean.
That list is pretty ambitious, there. You’re talking about the US? But anyway, that’s pretty much what people were saying in the ’30s and ’40s.Conditions were in some ways better then, and it still didn’t last.
Has…so far. And agsin, it’s not like the standard of living in Western Europe isn’t predicated on exploitative relations with people in other countries, either.
Oh, you’ll still have it, since it’s supported by powerful interests. And historical memory is very short. But I don’t think you even need a reemergence of this myth among the broader population for the dismantling to occur.
First, you speak as though this has already happened. But in any event I still don’t see any effect on the capitalist dynamic in the long term (again, it may be a matter of timescales). We may have to agree to disagree.
I am somewhat flooded with responses here. I will return to this argument tomorrow (I have an essay to do, and have wasted too much time on the internet today).
As regards SC’s remarks, I’d like to make a broader point here about appeals to authority, a logical fallacy which a few people here seem prone to commit. I don’t see what’s helpful or constructive about a comment like “I have also been studying the economic history of the world for almost as long as you’ve been alive, Walton.” This is a textbook case of an appeal to authority. It’s pretty clear to me that the least intelligent move I made here was revealing my age and educational background.
I do understand that many people here are, justifiably, annoyed by the kind of anti-intellectualism which subsists in some quarters. Rest assured, I do value the importance of education (hence why I am, as I have pointed out, a university student). But does the fact that I am nineteen years old, and am not yet a graduate, disqualify me from holding an opinion, or seeking to support it with empirical data? Contrary to what some of you seem to believe, I am not, in fact, a complete idiot, nor am I incapable of thinking and analysing information.
And the fact is that in economics, as in any other controversial field, the experts do not all agree. So any rational layman is compelled to choose between expert viewpoints, using his own powers of reasoning and an observation of the empirical evidence. Many here are fond of citing leftist Nobel Laureates; might I remind you that Milton Friedman also received a Nobel Prize? Would you prefer me to abandon my powers of reasoning and say “Ah, SC is an expert in economic history, ergo s/he must be right and I am wasting my time arguing.” I suspect not, given that a part of this forum’s ethos is the promotion of rational thinking.
I realise this isn’t a response to any of the substantive points made; as I said, I don’t have time to answer those this evening (it’s coming up to 1900 where I am).
SC: Your idea of “stages” is flatly contradicted by all evidence. You sound like a good Communist when you talk about them, though, which is amusing, if sad. You also resemble a Communist in that you appear perfectly willing to subject other people to such conditions in pursuit of your ideological ends, or consent to others doing so. Because in the gleaming future they’ll be shiny happy people!
That’s what always amazes me – the similarity in cadence between doctrinaire Stalinists (Lenninists/Maoists etc) and committed “Libertarians”. It’s the same poetry, with just slightly different jargon.
Poetry is what drives the world, in whatever language, logic or heraldry.
It’s no such thing (nor, FWIW, was my earlier reference to Paul Krugman): It’s simply an assertion that SC (and Krugman) might have more actual knowledge than you do regarding the issues under discussion. Dispute that if you can, but don’t claim it’s a logically fallacious or irrelevant point.
Need I remind you of what many Americans believe about evolution (or American history, for that matter), or the relation of belief to empirical fact?
This and everything that follows are mere assertions of what happened and why. You’ve simply inserted this series of events into a prefab interpretive framework of Chilean history. Am I supposed to accept “There’s not much question of that historically — just ask Chileans of that generation and that class,” as evidence? As I said, I don’t have any materials here to substantiate any arguments. It doesn’t appear you do, either. :)
So you agree with Shelley that “[p]oets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” do you? ;^)
Jesus Christ, Walton. It wasn’t an appeal to anything. It was a response to your own remark: “SC, with all due respect, I cannot understand how anyone, looking at the economic history of the world, can really make assertions such as those that you’ve made.” I was simply pointing out to you that you should not comment on how you can’t respect someone’s views “looking at the history of the world” when you have not really looked at the economic history of the world.
Your comment about your lack of understanding and respect for my arguments was snotty and evasive, and you’re doing again the same thing you did months ago: Turning the discussion to your personal sensitivities and away from the substance. Get over yourself, already. And take your lessons on logical fallacies and your misinterpretation of others’ comments and shove them up your ass.
Have you been applying your powers of reasoning? I must have missed it. Actually, you’re such an annoying git that I would prefer that at this moment. But what I’d really prefer is if you would stop capitalbotting and do more investigation of these matters from real sources.
SC: Am I supposed to accept “There’s not much question of that historically — just ask Chileans of that generation and that class,” as evidence? As I said, I don’t have any materials here to substantiate any arguments. It doesn’t appear you do, either. :)
No, you’re supposed to speak with actual live Chileans or pick up some sociological work on Chile! You are correct, I don’t happen to have my history textbooks in my office — so I can’t give you cites.
But your statements on Chile & Pinochet do not reflect an immersion from a Chilean point-of-view, or a good acquaintance with Chilean culture. Maybe you aren’t expounding it (but you usually have no problem with that!), but often there’s a certain American/European myopism that sees the world in light of your own centrality.
How could you understand the myth of Plan Zeta, except in light of the internal mechanics of 1973? How can you understand the end game of Allende without reference to Balmaceda? How can you understand the entire structure without discussing Bernardo O’Higgins/Riquelme and the underlying dynamics of the Chilean Revolution from 1810-1818, the counter-revolution against that revolution, and O’Higgins exile?
It’s like trying to discuss the current US election without referencing the militia movement of the ’90s, the Southern Strategy or the Civil War.
But the US population was less than 100 million, a war had destroyed half of Europe, there was a bonanza of growth to follow, and the US went on a ride. Free market capitalism does well in periods of high growth, even in terms of equity in wealth distribution and creation. But when growth started to slow down, in the early 70s, instead of adapting and evolving towards a mixed economy, the US continued stubbornly with artifically stimulating growth with money supply strategies rather than improving social welfare. And it continued blindly until now.
The US has to adapt to slow or no growth. It has no alternative. Or maybe only a 3rd WW.
BD: So you agree with Shelley that “[p]oets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” do you? ;^)
In the long term, poets and mathematicians rule the world.
That’s why we get stuck with collections of Iron age poetry as Truth. The human brain isn’t wired for science — it’s wired for songs.
Exactly.
PS: frog, I think either one of us – or neither – could be right about the overthrow of Allende without it really affecting the matter of the question I put to Walton, which was less about getting rid of Allende and more about the need for a dictatorship to implement these policies and transform economic relations in this drastic way. I think we can agree that Pinochet-Friedman didn’t have a broad popular mandate.
And they call liberals and atheists “utopianists”.
Has Walton come up with an explanation for why we need anti-trust laws?
I only meant my comment as a cheeky aside… but it serendipitously elicited this trenchant thought:
Yah. That’s why it’s so important that at least some of the scientists are poets. Sadly, there’s a false dualism embedded deep in our culture that says you can either be an artist or a rationalist, but never both. [sigh]
SC: But what I’d really prefer is if you would stop capitalbotting and do more investigation of these matters from real sources. What are “real sources”, pray? Is Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate, not a “real source”? Are the GDP figures, human development indices, and other published economic statistics regarding various countries not “real sources”? And despite your disdain for the World Index of Economic Freedom, it is an academic publication, backed by the Wall Street Journal, which has been referenced on numerous occasions in peer-reviewed literature.
I can only presume (hopefully wrongly) that by “real sources” you mean left-wing sources. I don’t doubt that there are mountains of peer-reviewed economic studies you could cite in support of your position. But the fact remains that there are still various different viewpoints, and the Smith-Hayek-Friedman free market viewpoint is the one to which I subscribe, based on plenty of empirical data and persuasive reasoning.
“No”, “no”, and “I wish you bloody well would” in that order. Convince us, please, but you’ll have to do better than merely stating your position. I’ve heard people stating your position for twenty years, and it strikes me as bizarre narcissism to suppose that your restatement of it is so special that we’re supposed to be convinced by it on this occasion by the merest fact that is is you who have stated it. Hint: a list of very dubious one-sided statements followed by a non-sequitur does not make a convincing argument.
Has Walton come up with an explanation for why we need anti-trust laws? – Yes. As I’ve said, the free market requires a legal and regulatory framework in order to function (this is why I don’t subscribe to anarcho-capitalism or minarchism). “Pro-market” is not the same as “doing whatever is in the interest of the biggest businesses” (hence why I agreed with Emmet Caulfield earlier that lobbying and “crony capitalism” are big problems in the US financial-regulatory system). Rather, the secret is in ensuring that there is free competition between service providers, so that consumers have a genuine choice. Competitive markets produce lower prices and greater prosperity. And to ensure that this happens, it is essential to ensure that price-fixing cartels do not form – hence the value of antitrust laws.
Pro-market != pro-business. To look at a different area of policy, for another example: in time of economic stress, industries will sometimes lobby for protectionist tariffs to “protect our jobs from foreign competition”. But this should never be granted; it might be in the narrow, sectional interest of a single industry, but it runs contrary to the interest of consumers, who are thereby deprived of the free choice (and lower prices) which come from a competitive free market.
Walton: But the fact remains that there are still various different viewpoints, and the Smith-Hayek-Friedman free market viewpoint is the one to which I subscribe, based on plenty of empirical data and persuasive reasoning.
See, Walton, a lot of us have difficulty accepting the positions of apologists for authoritarianism, the kind of folks who support death squads and military coups. I dismiss Stalinist economists as well, outside of very circumscribed analyses. Hell, I think 90% of economists are ideological buffoons, and not serious scientists. Kinda like most Bible scholars.
You just can’t trust someone who is willing to put a gun to your head, like Hayek and Friedman. And if your “Smith” is Adam Smith, he’d turn over in his grave to be put in the same club with those other SOB’s.
Not a dichotomy to which I subscribe, but unfortunately the number of job openings for engineer-poets or painter-biologists is so limited that most are forced to choose and one necessarily takes a back seat to the other. I think the art in STEM and the STEM in art are oft overlooked, though, and I find the intersections intriguing.
Ok, so regulated capitalism accounts for various flaws in human nature. Sorry, I misunderstood what you meant the first time around.
SC: I think we can agree that Pinochet-Friedman didn’t have a broad popular mandate.
You don’t need death-squads if you have a popular mandate, or even a significant plurality. No one supported Pinochet after the first couple of years — no one who wasn’t a raving lunatic. They even assassinated in his hospital bed in ’82 ex-President Frei, who had initally supported the coup. They were still killing teenage girls into the mid-80s.
My impression is that most Chileans were quite gratified when one of Allende’s sons spit on Pinochet’s glass coffin. The rest thought it was “rude” (or are raving lunatics).
Kseniya at #89:
Ok, so regulated capitalism accounts for various flaws in human nature. – Yes. Exactly.
Just to clarify for everyone else, I am not trying to argue that we should abolish the state and let corporations have free rein, as Murray Rothbard, inter alia, seems bizarrely to advocate. The state’s role is to safeguard individual rights and the rule of law, through an impartial and independent legal system. Without this, you don’t really have free markets; you just have “might makes right” and naked theft by the stronger party. I also disagree with “crony capitalism” in which lobbyists influence politicians and regulators towards the interests of the most powerful corporations, to the exclusion of their competitors; self-evidently, this is antithetical to free markets.
But what I am arguing against is statism: redistribution of wealth via high marginal tax rates on the wealthy, nationalisation of industries, an elaborate and expensive welfare state, tight labour market restrictions, protectionism, etc. All these things reduce prosperity. Private property and free trade constitute the bedrock of our society, and we must safeguard them, even if this means rejecting short-term popular statist solutions that would benefit certain sectors of society.
Walton,
And you don’t find surprising that for instance MM Bush and Paulson, two of the most ardent supporters of Friedmanian “Laissez faire” capitalism only two months ago, have now become, BY FORCE, two grandiose champions of government interventionism ?
That disconnect doesn’t make you “TICK” ?
You do have a thing about population, don’t you? :)
But it was the regulations and (meager though they were) protections that flourished in the booming post-war years – not free-market capitalism. As I argued above, my research into this (which was several years ago, admittedly, but that shouldn’t make a difference except for the fact that, as with Chile, I don’t have any of my books/articles/notes on the subject here to cite), at least in the case of finance, showed that the system was breaking down well before the crisis of the ’70s. This did give the free-market ideologues a foothold, though. Deregulation and the dismantling of the (again, already relatively small) welfare state were pushed through as the solution to the problems of the ’70s. That’s why you have to be careful about thinking that crises will lead to greater controls. They are often used – or manufactured – to promote “free markets,” as Naomi Klein has discussed.
It also has to be remembered that these developments did not result from shortsightedness or a lack of awareness on the part of those involved, but because there were strong forces within capitalism pushing in this direction. Even when there are capitalists who recognize the problems, they can’t reign in the dynamic of the system itself.
The US, regardless of the path it takes or its fortunes, isn’t the only country in the world. Capitalism is a global system. The developments that will lead it to plod on to the next crisis – unless it’s stopped or destroys the planet before it, well, destroys the planet – could also occur in Asia, Russia,…
I have read works on Chile – just don’t have them here.
I don’t see these as opposed. I don’t see why there would be a reluctance to emphasize a “Chilean” perspective that denies to whatever extent the influence of the US – not only the government but US corporations – or any other countries for that matter. To recognize this influence/intervention is not to discount or ignore local forces or dynamics. It simply sees them within a broader context. I’m from a school of history that is transnational and tries to break out of nationally-bound interpretive frameworks.
It may be that the role of the US was something other than many Chileans believe. Their point of view could simply be wrong. It’s an empirical matter. I’ve studied enough history to know that local people are often unaware of a lot of local history or have learned it through distorting nationalistic frames. (I’m sure there are historians from outside the US who could teach me a lot about New England’s history, for example.) In any case, as I noted above, the level of US involvement wasn’t the only question.
And how, prithee, do you reconcile the, for the most part eminently reasonable, position of #91 with your support for the croney-capitalist McCain/Palin ticket? McCain’s tonsils are as well acquainted with lobbyist cocks as Bush’s ever were. You don’t honestly believe all the “bringing change to Washington” bullshit that the spin machine feeds the rubes, do you? A manifest lie, peddled by the exact same Republican electioneers who peddled it for Bush/Cheney, is now believable? Just how gullible are you?
Walton,
you should go and interview people in Iceland right now, and ask them how happy they are with Friedman…
And I’ll just leave you to chew on these fine words from another Nobel prize in Economics (yet a slightly more recent one):
Walton, the difference is between people, like you and Friedman and McPalin who think in terms of absolutes, (eg “the perfection of free-markets”, good and evil, etc…) and those who understand that many factors change, evolve, and there is no ideal, we need to adapt to an ever changing environment.
SC: To recognize this influence/intervention is not to discount or ignore local forces or dynamics. It simply sees them within a broader context. I’m from a school of history that is transnational and tries to break out of nationally-bound interpretive frameworks.
Well, then, I guess we agree! Seriously though, that’s what makes history so difficult. You have dynamics occurring on time scales from the millenial down to the minute; geographic scales from the global down to personal exchanges (and internal dialogues).
A focus at any scale has a tendency to miss the other scales — and we all have our pet problems, particularly when it intersects with personal perspectives. I have to personally deal with crazy relatives — for you it’s just another piece of the global mechanism of capitalist exploitation.
For Walton, well he just wants to make it go away so he can continue worshipping his idols.
EC: Not a dichotomy to which I subscribe, but unfortunately the number of job openings for engineer-poets or painter-biologists is so limited that most are forced to choose and one necessarily takes a back seat to the other.
I’ve only every seen jobs for engineer-poets and painter-biologists! The rest are just technicians.
By real sources, Walton, I mean books on history. By historians. Why don’t you take a few countries – South Africa, Haiti,… – and study their history? (Economic history is one part of that, but cannot be understood without the larger context.) Focus on social movements.
That was really rhetorical, but thanks for elaborating.:)
Indeed he would. The question was about Friedman-Hayek-Pinochet. Walton still hasn’t answered it, but I’m sure any response from him would be as empty as any other. He’s an ideobot.
(And thanks for your support earlier, Bill Dauphin!)
SC: That was really rhetorical, but thanks for elaborating.:)
Just elaborating for the Libertarians that come along — but it appears they’ve been scared off for today!
Goodness – not at all! My interest in that part of Chilean history originally stemmed from reading years ago about toture and mass murder there, which played a role in my coming to focus on human rights and understanding the causes of state violence.
That aside, I think we have reached agreement. :)
Where can I apply for a visa to enter this Utopia where the vast bulk of engineering jobs aren’t very specific technical knowledge checklists?
EC: Where can I apply for a visa to enter this Utopia where the vast bulk of engineering jobs aren’t very specific technical knowledge checklists?
Just click your heels three times! The more constrained the tools, the better the art.
That’s entirely irrelevant to the job advertisements and hiring criteria. Don’t get me wrong, I see the beauty and creativity, the art and the craft in elegant circuit designs, PCB layouts, and code, and doubtless they’re there in mechanical and chemical engineering too (that are far from my experience), but the reality is that employers tend to strongly emphasise knowledge checklists (sometimes meaningless or impossible ones) in job advertisements. Sad but true.
I posted this fun headline in a previous thread:
Deregulation brings boom time to Iceland
That was written less than a year ago.
EC: the reality is that employers tend to strongly emphasise knowledge checklists (sometimes meaningless or impossible ones) in job advertisements.
Of course. Most employers (like most people) lack any aesthetic sense about their jobs. One more artistic challenge — Picasso is just a piker in comparison with an engineer who turns his career into an artistic endeavor.
That was written less than a year ago.
Thanks for the link! And if we had been having this conversation then, you can be sure Walton would have been pointing to it as a great deregulatory success story. Probably only because Iceland’s not associated with a sufficiently-dynamic creature – though I did enjoy Cod: A Short Biography of the Fish That Changed the World – was it not given some ridiculous name. (Or because these orgies are increasingly so short-lived that there isn’t time even to develop the full complement of mythology. Perhaps the powers-that-be should get to work on designing the propaganda campaign before they embark on deregulation, so they can have the greatest impact prior to the ensuing crisis.)
Emmet Caulfield at #94:
And how, prithee, do you reconcile the, for the most part eminently reasonable, position of #91 with your support for the croney-capitalist McCain/Palin ticket?
I support the McCain-Palin ticket as the lesser of two evils. There is no way, given the number of entrenched interests, that anyone is going to be elected in the United States who will genuinely reduce the size of government, cut taxation, cut federal spending across the board, and move towards a more impartial, non-politicised system of regulation. The entrenchment of existing interests is too strong for that kind of reform to be practical. I’d rather see crony capitalism, flawed as it is, than overt statism; thus McCain is the only acceptable option. Plus, though I don’t deny that he’s taken plenty of money from lobbyists in his time – as have all his Senate colleagues of both parties; it goes with the territory – I do have a lingering respect for John McCain as a man of integrity, though I’ve been less and less impressed by him recently.
But come to think of it, maybe I should support Bob Barr. I can’t vote anyway, not being a US citizen, so it doesn’t matter what I think.
Walton: maybe I should support Bob Barr
Ah yes, another man of integrity, who a few short years ago sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act, and now is the Libertarian party presidential nominee. What a man of principle, what a party of principle!
I betcha love that theocrat Huckabee too, like so many “principled” Libertarians.
Frog at #109: Well, who would you like me to “endorse”? (Not that anyone in America gives a damn what a random 19-year-old British national thinks about their presidential race.) As I’ve said, none of the candidates are entirely satisfactory from an economic point of view. I have outlined, above, the principles which I believe in; which candidate do you think best fits those beliefs?
But didn’t you notice, the last few weeks :
Your crony capitalism has irremediably led to overt statism.
Walton, wake up, the $700 billion package and all the government interventions that have preceeded (fannie mae, AIG, etc…) and will follow, if that’s not the biggest possible example of overt statism you can think of, what is ? And what led to it, if not crony capitalism, laissez faire capitalism.
For a fun read, I leave you with a historical perspective : 15 declarations made by Henry Paulson between August 2007 and last week.
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/10/no-time-to-wast.html
Walton, you don’t seem to understand, since a few weeks already, there’s not a single serious economist in the world who still believes Friedman was right. This crisis is the main evidence that shows that laissez faire capitalism, in one such important domain as banking and finance doesn’t work. It’s done. Turn the page. You’re following dead ideas.
And a nice quote for the day :
Walton: As I’ve said, none of the candidates are entirely satisfactory from an economic point of view.
You missed my point – the point is that you look at politics and freedom from an “economic point of view”. It’s all about the accounting for the little green pieces of papers. Ever read “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”?
That’s the kind of reductionism that Libertarians (and Marxist-Lenninists) make. So Bob Barr is your guy!
But don’t pretend you give a crap about liberty — if it’s reducible to economics, you’re not talking about freedom, you’re talking balancing accounting books.
It is bizarre, given that it is states that created corporations, have assisted them in their plunder and exploitation, and given them free rein (regulations on some corporations or industries at some moments do nothing to diminish this, and in fact have contributed to it). States and corporations are a match made in hell.
“Might makes right” and naked theft by the stronger party is the history of capitalism (see also colonialism, imperialism, invasion, occupation, CIA-orchestrated coups, etc.).
This is capitalism. Capitalism tends toward a reduction of competitors to a few politically-influential and independently-powerful giants. This is undeniable. Self-evidently, then, capitalism is antithetical to “free markets.”
I see. States as expropriators of land and resources and the military/police arm of corporations: not statist. States usurping public goods and handing them off to corporations: not statist. States as protectors of human life and well-being: statist. What about states enacting and enforcing bans on union organizing, beating striking workers or killing people who are trying to farm land, and controlling the movement of people across borders to suit the interests of corporations?
There. Fixed.
You really have to be brainwashed to think like this. Whose society are you talking about? Human beings and their freedom and dignity constitute the bedrock of our global society, and fulfilling human needs should be the foundation of any and all economic systems. The earth constitutes the bedrock – literally – of all human society, and protecting it should also be paramount. Capitalism is contrary to both of these fundamental goals.
Anyway, as I’ve said before, your ideas are so discredited among so many people on this planet that they would simply be the object of ridicule were it not for the fact that they serve the interests of the most powerful people and organizations, who have means of violence and coercion on their side and aren’t afraid to use them.
And any candidate who supported your principles would be a monster. Yes, you have stated them, over and over, just as you did back in May. It’s pointless and tiresome to read your incessant “I”-filled manifestos. Several other commenters here aren’t US citizens either, but they have plenty to contribute about American politics. You have your repetitive statements of principles. Enough, already. Go back in search of that lettuce abattoir.
And don’t bother responding to this unless you’re going to respond to all of the questions I asked earlier.
it doesn’t matter what I think.
no, no. You’ve got that a bit wrong.
It’s that no-one CARES what you think.
You can always make what you think “matter”, for better or worse.
…and you can always bait someone into conversing with you here, obviously.
but nobody really cares what you think.
If you want to begin your education about what happens when government DOESN’T intervene to save systemically important financial institutions, all you have to do is look at the domino effect from the failure of Lehman Brothers.
compare the delayed response to the financial crisis here vs. how the UK has been handling it, and then tell me how government should just “step off” from “interfering” in market capitalism.
It’s just blind ignorance on your part, as usual.
In this ideological wonderland, policies that would seem to help people on the ground – keep them from malnutrition, enable them to organize to protect their interests, help them to maintain a living wage, keep them alive and healthy and out of bankruptcy – these all really reduce “prosperity.” And people can’t be trusted to determine what’s in their own best interests because they don’t get it: If they would just go along with the program and submit to insecurity, starvation wages, and corporate rule for, well, however long that “stage” lasts, and go along with the dismantling of all public institutions and the selling off of the natural resources on which they depend for survival, they’ll emerge on the other side in the glorious Land of Prosperity. How could they not see? So they have to be driven, even against their will, to do what will be best for them in the long run. It’s all so frighteningly absurd. More echoes of Marxism and of “we had to destroy the village to save it.”
SC: And people can’t be trusted to determine what’s in their own best interests because they don’t get it
Except that in the wonderland, they’re ostensibly choosing that “lifestyle” — but only when it’s not an explicit, rational choice, but a hidden, market-driven choice. So free choice is slavery, but the company store is freedom!
Like that wonderful aphorism “Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding on dinner”, as if the wolves were in the majority! What an ecosystem these folks imagine!
Of course it’s all BS. It’s all about the fear of the dark-skinned folks taking the stuff away that the light-skinned folks have legitimately stolen. And it’s about following the toughest thugs in town, since the world is just theft anyway.
Libertarians are always more entertaining with a few beers in them around the barbecue, where raw honesty comes out.
How could they not see?
not enough money to buy those rose-colored glasses.
:P
“Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding on dinner”, as if the wolves were in the majority!
man, that sounds like an excellent one sentence summary of the introduction to Mills’ essay: On Liberty.
…copied into my collection of useful quotes.
thanks.
Libertarians are always more entertaining with a few beers in them around the barbecue, where raw
honestyviolence comes out.that’s been my experience of drunk wanna-be libertarians anyway.
But still doesn’t make anywhere near sure your ballot will be counted!
In the short term, yes.
But in the long term — who will create jobs if there are no innovations? Who will invent anything when nobody has learned anything? Education is an investment.
They are keeping capitalism alive.
As I keep saying, and as you have mentioned yourself, when you leave capitalism to itself, megamergers, cartels and monopolies result, eliminating competition and thus ending capitalism. Capitalism needs to be constantly protected from itself, because competition is — from a selfish point of view — a waste of resources and is therefore, just like in evolution, selected against. The greatest force for capitalism in the world today is the EU Commissioner for Competition.
You keep using these examples. They establish very clearly that capitalism in general is way better than outright communism. But what do they say about a European-style welfare state with a capitalistic economy but also a safety net for people?
Also, “not exploitative” is not automatically correct. The early decades of countries like South Korea were really not pretty.
Yeah, and that too. And in Japan, the ties between the big corporations and the government were very similar.
Ichthyic,
but, but, you don’t seem to understand, Walton will assure you that with good old Libertarian principles, we would all have been much better off if governments had not intervened at all in this whole quagmire. Should have let AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Morgan Stanley, etc… all go bankrupt. No rescue package, no guarantees, nothing.
Not do a thing. No intervention at all. Remember, free markets wll take care of it, they’re perfect !
That would have been an interesting experiment.
By now, the DJIA would be around 1500 pts, hundreds of small and larger banks would be bankrupt, millions of households would have lost most of their deposits as the FDIC could only cover $46 billion losses, tens of thousands of small businesses would have not been able to meet payroll,…
Hey afterall, markets are always right, they always find the solution from themselves. No government intervention needed.
But note that unlike SfO Walton supports a “strong stance” in the “War on Terror,” because, y’know, that’s not statist at all and has absolutely nothing to do with crony capitalism.
Walton will assure you that with good old Libertarian principles, we would all have been much better off if governments had not intervened at all in this whole quagmire. Should have let AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Morgan Stanley, etc… all go bankrupt. No rescue package, no guarantees, nothing.
Not do a thing. No intervention at all. Remember, free markets wll take care of it, they’re perfect !
of course. What really pisses me off is that people like Walton actually claim these are “libertarian” ideals, and that just makes no sense whatsoever… unless one goes back over 100 years.
It is really like they have completely ignored (or likely never bothered to learn) the past 100 years of how capitalism actually has worked (and failed to work) in this country, let alone in the rest of the world.
that’s why I say they aren’t even libertarians. They just want to be called libertarians, in the same way McCain likes the label “maverick”.
They are no more in touch with reality regarding economics and politics, than your garden variety creationist is in touch with the reality of the biological sciences.
I wonder if THIS month, JCR would be spouting off the same nonsense as Walton?
If so, that would be entirely remarkable.
Perhaps the powers-that-be should get to work on designing the propaganda campaign before they embark on deregulation, so they can have the greatest impact prior to the ensuing crisis.
“We had to destroy the economy, in order to save it”?
Not as long as there are vegetarian vampires and virgin whores to be found!
But don’t pretend you give a crap about liberty — if it’s reducible to economics, you’re not talking about freedom, you’re talking balancing accounting books.
I respectfully disagree. Economic freedom is one of the most important types of freedom. The right to start a business, to earn, keep and spend your own money, to do as you wish with your own property – if government can arbitrarily remove these things, then you have no true freedom.
I don’t deny that there are other types of freedom. Civil liberties are important, as is freedom of speech. I’m not exactly thrilled about Guantánamo Bay, or about some of the more extreme anti-terror legislation in my own country (against which the Conservative party has, incidentally, been campaigning). But because the economy directly affects everyone’s lives and livelihoods on a daily basis, I hardly think it’s unreasonable of me to consider it the biggest concern. Like I said, I tend to agree with Obama on social freedom, but with McCain on economic freedom; and right now economic freedom is more of a priority.
I’m not exactly thrilled about Guantánamo Bay,…But…
– Walton, 14 October 2008
http://www.counterpunch.org/grandin11172006.html
Terror is liberty. Suffering is prosperity. Death is life. Dictatorship is democracy. Capitalism is freedom.
Walton,
and this crisis does seem to prove that “economic freedom” requires government intervention and some form of socialism to save the markets…
After AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, …
U.S. to Buy Stakes in Nation’s Largest Banks
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122390023840728367.html?mod=djemalert
Looks like a whole chunk of the American economy is now going to be under government control. Next step is healthcare. Welcome to a mixed economy !
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine [note: from uncorrected proof – may not be exactly the same in published version]
Orlando Letelier, “The Chicago Boys in Chile: Economic Freedom’s Awful Toll”:
http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?page=letelier-docs_thenation
– Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine [note: from uncorrected proof – may not be exactly the same in published version]
Walton: But because the economy directly affects everyone’s lives and livelihoods on a daily basis, I hardly think it’s unreasonable of me to consider it the biggest concern
Yes, and everybody’s life is touched every day by the class struggle, so first we must eliminate class oppression and then the political and social freedoms will follow.
You sound just like a Lenninist. In view of history, you are unreasonable. Just ask the dead in Chile how they feel about Hayek’s “economic freedom is the essential freedom” mantra — they are oh-so-free to roll in their graves.
You never answered SC’s questions about Hayek and Chile. You’re just playing a doctrinaire game devoid of substance. You’re just silly.
SC,
thx for the Letelier, wish it would open the mind of all these young people like Walton who have been brainwashed with “government intervention is always bad” Friedmanian principles.
Because it’s entire generations that have been brainwashed. In all the top business schools for instance (such as the one I visited 15 years ago), this has been the prevalent doctrine, whether in the USA, in Europe or in Asia, all over the world, for the last 3 decades. It will take a huge effort to reverse the damage done by Friedman on humanity.
neg,
You’re welcome. If it makes you feel any better, most of my students are business majors, and they’re much more open to critical perspectives than one would expect. (I don’t try to shove ideas down their throats or expect them to agree with me, certainly – in fact, I don’t really talk about my politics – but I’ve been surprised by their responses to some of the readings.) I know a professor who assigns Friedman et al. at the beginning of class and then proceeds to dissect these ideas, and his class has had a powerful influence on students.
Also, after a couple of generations of critical social scientists lost to repression, new generations are again coming to the fore in Latin America. That’s promising, as long as the US (corps and government) and the rich there don’t get their way through violence again.
I agree, though – a huge effort will be required. I do think the global political conditions for it now, while exceedingly dangerous, are better than they’ve been in a long time.
Wow, how did you get access to an uncorrected proof copy? Are you an editor or a book reviewer? Did you buy it on eBay? Are you actually Naomi Klein, and “SC” is just a nom de blog? Enquiring minds want to know!
:) It’s on loan from a friend. Someone gave it to him (possibly passed along from someone else), but I don’t know who. I probably shouldn’t be quoting from it, but it’s the only copy I have (and I am noting that it’s not the published version). I wish I were an editor or reviewer and people sent me proofs.
SC,
we had this exchange above about whether mixed economies could stick and dominate the world, including the USA.
My view is that for the next decades, the only alternative that might be opted for (or rather, pushed for) is dictated corporatism, or better said, facism, and the risk is especially high in the USA.
In 4 years, the candidate that could run against Obama, under a strong Libertarian “New Republican” programme, could be the greatest facist danger humanity has faced.
The same risk will repeat itself, in 8 years.
Is this something we can afford, just wait until it… happens ?
The only possibility is that a real generational shift takes place, in the same way as it did in Europe, that religiosity declines drastically (as it has already started to), and that republicans move in the opposite direction, towards a more centrist policy and maintain a similar version of mixed economy.
Will this new generation, generation X, have had enough time to understand the risks ?
That’s precisely what I meant by “while exceedingly dangerous” in my comment above.
Dude, you’re making me feel even guiltier than I ordinarily feel (and that’s saying something)! I’m doing my tiny part as an educator, but I haven’t been active much beyond that in recent months. Alas, sometimes life interferes…but that’s not really an excuse. I do need to get back to writing and activist work soon.
Neg: In 4 years, the candidate that could run against Obama, under a strong Libertarian “New Republican” programme, could be the greatest facist danger humanity has faced.
Let’s say that a strong Liberterian will be the next Republican. The failure of McCain will mean that the Republican party will have to reorganize itself, just as they did with Goldwater — and I’m sure they will double down, because they missed their real opportunity in the 60’s, which was to become the party of civil rights. That was their natural evolution, but they failed.
The Dems became the party of “economic justice” back in the late twenties, after 90 years of being an also-ran with few exceptions. The natural evolution for parties in the US is that a dominant party holds power for 30 to 90 years, becoming entrenched, until we reach a breaking point on some new issue of democracy. In 1828, it was universal white male suffrage; in 1858 it was slavery and the end of feudal agriculture; in 1932 it was regulated capitalism; and in 1968 it was universal civil rights. That last should have been the republicans, but instead they went reactionary.
So now the dems become what I think Obama called “paternalistic libertarianism”, updating the regulatory state while expanding social freedoms. Which really screws the Republicans since they aren’t a naturally decripit party like the Dem’s of 1858 or the Rep’s of 1932.
The Republicans are a failed party, like the Whigs.
“Paternalistic libertarianism” is a contradiction in terms.
There is paternalism and there is freedom. Either the government knows what is best for us and how we should live our lives, or it does not. I happen to believe that it does not.
Walton: There is paternalism and there is freedom.
See, there you go again, oversimplifying everything into black and white. Grow the hell up — it’s a nasty, complicated world, and no single code or system can handle it. Read up on 20th century physics and mathematics, instead of taking 18th century pipedreams of completeness as the latest word.
Gah, yes it would be nice if there were a single, simple, powerful and complete logical system that subsumed the world — but that’s not just empirically impossible, it’s logically impossible. In the end, your dream is a totalitarian one — it’s the dream of the enlightenment, but a failed one that gave us the 20th century nightmare. We’ve known since at least the thirties that it is impossible.
Instead of living on the rotting corpses of the long-dead, why don’t you get some life?
So, as I suggested in #119, you’re partisan of the notion that we, the people, would have been better off if the government had done nothing, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, in this financial crisis. Let AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, Morgan Stanley, hundreds of small and large banks go bankrupt, millions lose their deposits, tens of thousands of companies not being able to meet payroll, etc… ?
Is that what you are suggesting ?
You haven’t replied to this until now, you seem to avoid it… ;-)
Walton: Either the government knows what is best for us and how we should live our lives, or it does not.
So you always know best what to do? You have infinite information available to you, are a kind of god-like being? Then what the hell do we need markets for? What do we need families for, communities for?
We should just exist as Spenglerian Ego’s, sovereign each to ourselves, every transaction unique, every event a free meeting of two Minds.
That’s just absurd. It’s simply verifiable that we all have limited available information, that certain facts are more easily ascertained at some scales than others, that we essentially depend on each other, and particularly on experts, for our very daily survival.
Y’all live in a fantasy world more obscure and distorted than the Christians, completely unmoored from empirical reality.
Walton,
for the last 17 years in a row, Iceland has been a Fiedmanian paradise of deregulation. It has enjoyed an absolute bonanza, a small minority has become incredibly rich.
Today, the country is officially bankrupt. It is the canary in the coalmine, because it means that it’s debt, as a country, is as worthy as those subprime households…
The FMI will have to intervene, they’ve asked Russia for help, nobody knows what will be the future of the 200,000 inhabitants of the country.
And Mr Friedman had made such a great impression on these young Icelandic students a few decades ago who took power later and implemented his policies.
See, you could have been one of them … Ideals, absolutes, symplistic assumptions, economic freedom, government intervention bad, free markets good, perfect competition, etc…
When will you start opening your mind and stop reasoning in terms of absolutes and start putting into question the symplistic assumptions you have been brainwashed with ?
I don’t pretend that socialism is good and capitalism is bad, that government intervention is good and that free markets are bad. This is crazy. I dislike these symplistic notions profoundly. But today, we know that it’s about finding the right balance, it’s about complex and evolving equlibriums, responsivness, adaptability. And there’s no perfection in anything, certainly not in markets, nor in competition, nor in government responses.
So how can you say that governments NEVER know what’s best for the people ? Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they are needed, sometimes they should get out of the way. So it’s about finding the right balance, it’s an itterative process and it depends on changing factors. For instance demographcs have changed radically, resources availability, environmental impact, there are trade-offs between social welfare and economic growth, risk mitigation, etc…
We do not live in a world of absolutes.
NE: But today, we know that it’s about finding the right balance, it’s about complex and evolving equlibriums, responsivness, adaptability
Preach it! Do I hear a witness?
I said, do I hear a witness!
Walton, just look at biological systems — they’re built out of a multitude of scales, use both centralized and decentralized mechanism, are constantly altering the mechanism of control, and have feedbacks over scales from the global to the angstrom.
Why? Because they aren’t simple mechanical or equilibrium systems at a single scale that can have a single, simple mathematical and deterministic representation. They have no non-temporal “optima”. You can’t reduce an ecology to organisms, you can’t reduce an organism to cells, you can’t reduce cells to proteins, and you can’t reduce proteins to atoms.
Learn biology. Dump the political science stuck in 18th century navel-gazing. It’s crap.
Learn biology. Dump the political science stuck in 18th century navel-gazing. It’s crap.
You’re quite right that I have very limited knowledge about biology; thus I can’t judge your analogy between biology and economics.
But I will say that I do agree entirely that economies do not have a universal “optimum point” (of public spending v. private wealth) that will work perfectly in every country. What works in tiny countries such as Singapore would not work the same way in the United States. (I wish it would; they spend 3% of their GDP on healthcare, compared to the US’s 15%, and yet have better health statistics. Go figure.) All modern economies (except possibly North Korea) are, to some degree, mixed economies. So I do think there is a time and a place for government intervention; but I’m arguing that we should be very reluctant to expand the reach of the state, and that, generally, industry and wealth should be in private hands and should function in a competitive market.
You can’t reduce an ecology to organisms, you can’t reduce an organism to cells, you can’t reduce cells to proteins, and you can’t reduce proteins to atoms. – Surely there’s a problem with this analogy? An organism is a thing greater than the sum of its parts. Human society, on the other hand, is not greater than the sum of its parts; as Mrs Thatcher said, “There is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women and there are families.” When we talk of “society” or “the public” or “the people” or the community”, it’s really just shorthand for a number of autonomous individuals, with their own wishes, interests and wills, who happen to live in the same area. Although different cultural and economic contexts in different countries do, of course, affect how far a particular economic system will prosper, it is ultimately true that all politico-economic thinking should, in the end, be about people – individual people – not about “society”. And every government action should be evaluated in terms of which individuals it will burden (with higher taxation etc.) and which individuals it will benefit.
The wind continues to howl.
Walton,
… getting better ! Friedman would have never admitted this.
Hey, read this article, it’s from another nobel prize winner, and very thought provoking :
“The Financial Crisis: Why Were Warnings Ignored?”
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2008/10/
Conclusion : markets inherently CANNOT self regulate. They are fundamentally INNEFFICIENT at preventing crises, they create them.
What you don’t seem to understand Walton, is that over the last 3 decades at least, capitalists have become immensely richer. They have reaped entirely the profits of this artificially accelerated growth driven by leveraging and money supply.
Now, the masses are going to have to pay back, for years, maybe decades, all these extra profits in arials, for them.
This is the beauty of the system you are defending so vehemently, and you are only 19 yold. You are defending a system that will cost you (I suppose you didn’t make a fortune as a capitalst over the last two decades, did you ?)as well as the rest of 99% of humanity, some of the harshest moments in its history. Why ?
neg,
Not his best work, but you may be interested in this piece by Chomsky from a few days ago.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2008/1010/1223560345968.html
(When I was working on finance capital about a decade ago -and predicting this crisis – I had a friend who would tease me: “Bretton Woods, Bretton Woods, Bretton Woods. Can’t you talk about anything else?” Now I have some company :). My argument differed in that I was saying that it was starting to collapse, as I said the other day, from the ’50s, and really right from the start. To paraphrase the dude from Jurassic Park: Capitalism finds a way. I don’t know that Chomsky would disagree with this, but he’s not arguing it here.)
from the 50’s ?
come on, that’s far too early.
Look at this curve :
http://tickersense.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/10/10/dow_declines.jpg
The turning point was 1983. The DJIA then went on to multiply by 12 in the next two decades (as much as it took the previous 80 years, whereas there was no real productivity or demographic growth in these two decades, unlike the previous eight !).
When you have the market that is fundamentally in disconnect with reality, you know that you’ve got yourself a MEGA MEGA bubble.
In my view, bigger than the 1929 bubble, it took 30 years to get that one covered, I don’t think this one will ever resorb. But this is a unique opportunity : how can we live in a new world, one of zero economic growth, which is what we need anyway for environmental reasons ?
Walton (#143):
And what makes you think that human society is immune to the general principle that the complex interaction of individual components tends to give rise to emergent properties?
I think you may be making an is/ought error here. The idea that moral and political decisions should be predicated on the interests of humans as individuals (a principle that you on the right and myself on the left share, although we may understand or prioritise those interests differently) is one thing. Denying that there is such a thing as society is something else, because this is patently false. Human interactions create institutions (in the broad sense of the term) which form an environment that shapes us even as we shape it. There are complex webs of relationships which bind individuals together, for good or for ill. That is what society is. No, it’s not a moral entity with interests like those of individuals. But it is there, and we are part of it, and it involves a damned sight more than “living in the same area”, and it is more than the sum of its parts.
SC,
Looks like Sarkozy and Merkel are going to propose a new Bretton Woods, a new financial architecture for the world.
Walton: An organism is a thing greater than the sum of its parts. Human society, on the other hand, is not greater than the sum of its parts; as Mrs Thatcher said, “There is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women and there are families.”
That was a very, very stupid comment by Thatcher. She should have known better, because the statement is self-contradictory — if there are “families”, an aggregate greater than it’s parts, then the rest of the statement is untrue.
And of course you know that — you know that markets exist, and that they do not function as a series of dual independent transactions, but have a market-level dynamic that is consistent with but not determined by the individual transactions. Therefore, you have such concepts of “market price” and “marginal utility”.
Of course our organizations are not just clumps of human beings, their behavior is not determined solely by independent entities, but have a group dynamic, just like dictothyleum (I probably got the slime mold species wrong) — which are both individual but also have group behavior.
Just dogmatic bullshit — that societies don’t exist. Read yourself some Jared Diamond, his stuff is both readable and well-researched. Read something other than Thatcherite propaganda.
NE: Conclusion : markets inherently CANNOT self regulate. They are fundamentally INNEFFICIENT at preventing crises, they create them.
It seems to me that this is true of capital markets. Unlike most other markets which are tied to the transaction, ultimately, of physical entities that are of value in and of themselves (feed, vcrs, etc), capital markets function on betting on growth and decline — buying stocks and selling them short.
That means that the market is most profitable for the traders when it is unstable. Even more so, with markets for higher derivatives. Like any other sets of equations, a fairly stable integral gives more and more unstable derivatives as you go up (a metaphor, for those who will bitch that I’m mixing uses of the word derivative).
Capital markets are driven to instability by profit seeking.
It’s not profit seeking per se that drives instability, but greed (which is also a form of profit seeking, but one where the profit that one seeks is not anymore in any relationship with the risks, the work, and the added value that one is bringing).
I’ve given an example in this comment of a hypothetical hedge fund investor between 1990 and 2000 :
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/10/whoa_hitchens_endorses_obama.php#comment-1157035
That’s not profit seeking anymore, but greed, that’s what drives instability. Someone who invests in the stockmarket $1 million should expect, historically, not more than 10% returns per year. That’s comensurate with the risks he is taking, and the added value that his investment brings to the overall community. When some people try to make much more than this, hundred times more, by inventng new instruments or taking advantage of accelerating a credit bubble that they know will one day explode, that’s greed.
Absolutely not. Shares are also tied ultimately to physical entities, machines, peoples, inventories, assets.
Markets don’t function on “betting on growth and decline”. Markets are instruments of growth, of financiation of the economy. But when that growth is artificially accelerated by hyperleveraging and extraordinary money supply, and is not anymore in relation wth the real growth of the economy, the real growth of what people own and the populations, then they eventually go down.
If capitalists would learn to behave in a less greedy manner and focus on sustainable growth, rather than “growth”, capital markets would always grow. Slowly, but surely, and there would be none of these crisis.
You get it fundamentally wrong.
Markets don’t exist for traders to make profits. Traders are just a tiny fraction of necessary people that administer those markets. Markets are created to raise capital, to find investors who are willing to participate in the new ideas and growth of the economy, inherently, value creation.
Margin traders and speculators do make a lot of money in very volatile periods lke this one, but that’s not what drives the existence of capital markets. This is an epiphenomenon, and it tends to destroy some of the efficiency of the value creation of capital markets.
Not at all. The beginning of the end was the emergence of the euromarkets. (I don’t believe there was anything intentional at this point necessarily, though). When I made this argument years ago, I based it on historical data from very mainstream works in financial history (e.g., Eric Helleiner’s). The difference was I placed it within a broader historical timescale and larger capitalist dynamics. This was not a phase or form of capitalist accumulation, as others argue, but merely a brief hitch in a long-term progression. That was the funny thing about my great interest in Bretton Woods. I was really only concerned with it to the extent that I was seeking to disprove the claim that it was anything other than an architecture built on sand, as will be any newer version of same. (Which is not to say, I’ll state again, that I oppose all such efforts. Like Chomsky, I believe they spare real people real suffering, are founded on laudable values, and provide a space for democratic action. Barring a fight, though, ultimately capitalism finds a way.)
Grr, I wish I had all of my boxes of photocopies, notes, and drafts. I need a real house, with rooms full of built-in bookshelves…
And if I could sprout wings, I would fly, fly, fly away. :)
Neg: Margin traders and speculators do make a lot of money in very volatile periods lke this one, but that’s not what drives the existence of capital markets. This is an epiphenomenon, and it tends to destroy some of the efficiency of the value creation of capital markets.
No, it’s the margin that drives the system — the “epiphenomenon”. Prices aren’t set by the value of the underlying goods (even though they are necessary), but by the bets on growth/decline. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have what you call “greed” (just an emotional word for short-term profit maximization). It’s the old marginal utility problem.
Most of the exchanges on the market are not direct capitalization — they’re not IPOs are new stock to capitalize new projects or buy outs, they’re exchanges on stocks already in the market. They’re bets on the “derivatives” (in the cal sense) of value, not on the value itself. And those drive the price-setting.
What are the P/E ratios that have been common? Aren’t they 10:1, 20:1 and higher even? Those aren’t people betting on dividends, those are folks betting on the demand for the stocks themselves.
You’re right that the market isn’t primarily composed of speculators — but that’s where the money is being made. That’s why we have $70 trillion in CDS’s (a different market, of course).
A casino is primarily composed of people eating food, wait staff, accountants, janitors, folks at the bar, technicians behind the scenes, managers, valets, entertainers, and so forth. That doesn’t mean that the teleology of the system depends primarily on those people.
It’s a mistake to think that the casualty of “epiphenomena” is less important than the levels that give rise to it. We’re just atoms floating around, but that’s not what explains the stock-market.