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Anti-reformists in Europe claim to be protecting Europe’s weak and poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Labour-market flexibility, deregulation of the service industry, pension reforms and greater competition in university funding might harm the interest of well-connected, privileged citizens but it would open up opportunities for Europe’s youth and disadvantaged groups. A real left-wing agenda would embrace reform.

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Continental Europe is in the midst of a burning discussion about the pros and cons of market-friendly reforms and greater economic liberalism. We all know what the package contains – competition, labour-market flexibility, liberalisation of services, lower taxes, and privatisations.

The traditional debate runs as follows. These reforms are “right wing” policies. They may increase efficiency – perhaps even economic growth – but they also tend to increase inequality and to be detrimental for the poorest in society. Therefore – and here comes the typical “socially compassionate” European argument – be very careful moving in that direction. Governments should proceed cautiously and be ready to backtrack at any point.

Much of this reasoning is fundamentally wrong. Labour-market flexibility, deregulation of the service industry, pension reforms and greater competition in university funding is not anti-equality. Such reforms shift financing from taxpayers to the users themselves and, as such, tend to eliminate rents. They tend to increase productivity by basing rewards on merit rather than on being an insider. They tend to open up opportunities for younger workers who are not yet well-connected. Pursuing pro-market reforms does not imply facing a trade-off between efficiency and social justice. In this sense, pro-market policies are “left wing”, if that means reducing the economic privileges enjoyed by “insiders”.

Expanding on some of the messages of a book we published a year ago, this is the argument we make in our new short book – Il liberismo è di sinistra. The new book was written with Italy in mind, but most of our comments apply equally to other European reform-laggards, France above all. Our point is that the goals that are traditionally held dear by the European left – like protection of the economically weakest and aversion to excessive inequality and un-earned rewards to insiders – should lead the left to adopt pro-market policies. What has often been the norm in Europe from the 60s until recently – heavy market regulation, protection of the status quo, an enormous public sector which rewards not the very poor but the most-connected and requires highly distortionary taxation, universities which often produce mediocrity in the name of egalitarianism (while the very rich get a good education anyway, somehow) –all end up decreasing efficiency and justice at the same time.

A good example can be found in the labour market. In Italy, Spain, and France, the labour market is split. The young are hired with temporary contracts which offer no social security and no prospects. When the contract expires, the employer opts not to renew it, so as not to run the risk of having to convert temporary hires into permanent employees who would de facto immediately acquire the right never to be fired. Reforms that eliminate this duality by making the entire labour market flexible with an appropriate scheme of unemployment compensation would not only reduce unemployment but, most importantly, would favour the really poor and the young entry-level workers. This is an example of a pro-market policy that favours the poor.

Or think of public spending and consider again the case of Italy. The government there does very little to protect families from the risk of falling below the poverty line. Why? Because Italy spends too much on pensions and too little on other welfare programs. Guess who is against reducing pension expenditure by increasing the retirement age? The unions, supported by much of the left! By adopting this stance, unions are not helping the poor, just their members who are old workers from heavily unionised sectors and other retirees. During the Summer, the threat of a general strike – in which only the old, unionised and protected workers would have stopped working (certainly not the young with temporary contracts and no social security) – was enough to convince the left-wing government to lower the retirement age from 60 to 58. This will create an even bigger burden for today’s young. How can anybody claim that these unions and their political allies in the left still represent the young and the poor?

If there is no trade-off then between social justice and efficiency in today’s Europe, why are reforms so slow in coming to nations like Italy and France? Why is the typical “compassionate” European voter confused about the pro-poor features of pro-market reforms? The answer is the usual one in political economics – the “insiders” block reforms, although the political mechanisms vary from country to country. Alas, they can’t simply say no to reforms just because they would hurt their interests. They need the rhetoric of defending the weak and poor.

Consider for instance the case of the Italian State-owned airline, Alitalia. The company has been losing money now for more than 10 years, costing taxpayers a fortune. Pilots are paid as much as elsewhere, but fly half the hours. And a coffee served on an Alitalia flight is twice as expensive as on any other regular airline, not to mention low-cost carriers. The company’s unions fight to keep receiving state aid, and one can understand this. But why should a left-wing government be on their side and keep taxing the poor to transfer money to the relatively well-off Alitalia crews? By keeping Alitalia alive, it prevents creative destruction in the airline industry which would create more jobs, not fewer.

Reformists in Europe should refuse to be pushed in the corner of the equation: “more market equals more injustice”. It is exactly the opposite. Accepting this equation—and trying to apologise for it – is certainly not the way to win the battle. If the European left wants to be able to say honestly that it fights for the neediest members of our society, it must adopt as its battle cry the pursuit of competition, reforms and a system based on meritocracy.

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Oops, forgot to add the link. Article is by Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi.

[ 05 October 2007: Message edited by: Stephen Gordon ]

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Labour-market flexibility, deregulation of the service industry, pension reforms and greater competition in university funding might harm the interest of well-connected, privileged citizens but it would open up opportunities for Europe’s youth and disadvantaged groups. A real left-wing agenda would embrace reform.

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HAHAHAHA!!!!

anyways, this is pretty much the Blair agenda, love it or hate it, and also the Hartz agreements on reform in Germany go in this sense after lengthy tripartite negotiations, and much farther back, following a steep economic crisis, the Dutch unions agreed to this kind of labour market reform, the result of which is arguably the low unemployment in Netherlands today:
http://tinyurl.com/ynkqha

[ 05 October 2007: Message edited by: Geneva ]

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They tend to increase productivity by basing rewards on merit rather than on being an insider.

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Contrary to what the authors write, I think the real left should be distrustful of the idea that markets reward "merit".

Markets reward those who sell successfully. This is most easily done by directing your efforts at the wealthy, not the poor.

The poor have no market power because markets deal in money, and they have none.

Furthermore, markets generally will be equal only if 1) money is divided equally among all possible participants in the market, and 2) information is also equally available to everyone.

Commonly, "insiders" do very well in market economies. It is simply impossible to prevent insider knowledge being shared within families, and within crony groups.

And when they're mature enough, they can decide if they want to go into a quarter century worth of "merit" and personal debt in order to access post-secondary education in this Northern Puerto Rico with more oil and gas and massive, simply massive amounts of total energy flowing to the U.S. than any other country in the world.

[ 05 October 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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It is simply laughable to claim that rewards are based on merit in a market economy.

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I note that you don't have a problem with an inheritance tax.

That's encouraging. But unless there is a 100% inheritance tax, someone is getting rewarded for non-meritorious reasons.

So, which market economies have a 100% inheritance tax?

More profoundly, "merit" is a near-meaningless term. If I spend my life studying ethics, that has little "merit", but if I figure out a really cool design for sunglasses, and get some wealthy corporation to market it, that is like, highly meritorious, right?

In a real market economy, sharp elbows will get you quite a long way. So will selling water in really nice-looking plastic bottles. So will inventing a "mild" cigarette.

__________________________

What's new here is that arguments, like products, are being imported from Europe. I suppose there is a certain amount of respect for things "European" among Canadians, especially since the same ideological imports from the USA are treated with the suspicion and contempt from people on the left that they deserve.

The arguments, as well, remind me of the practice of conservatives who focus almost exclusively on those issues likely to incite conflict among people who should stick together and show solidarity with each other - so that they will focus on racial conflict, better-off workers versus less well-off workers, the employed versus the unemployed, and so on. It's boringly predictable.

The market is no substitute for democracy. If it was, one dollar would be one vote; however, we know that those with more dollars simply get more "votes". Much of market mumbo-jumbo is precisely the effort to convince people otherwise. More democracy in economic life is - wait for it - socialism. Horrors! But that's what the "left" should underline. More democracy. More say in social life, regardless of the financial wherewithal as a prerequisite.

Look at the terms used: Labour-market "flexibility", "deregulation" of the service industry, pension "reforms" and greater "competition" in university funding. The "quoted" words all have special meanings and are typically euphemisms for attacks on working people. Labour market "flexibility" means more precarious employment, the undermining of unions, the use of "guest workers" deprived of the most basic human rights and treated like cattle, cuts to welfare and employment insurance, and other atrocities that benefit the bosses at the expense of working people. A similar analysis could be done with other terms.

Why "the left" should pay special attention to lectures from liberals is beyond me. How many times do we hear the predictable Liberal platitude about, say, the NDP being their "conscience"? Of course, the NDP is hardly all of the left, and the Liberals don't really listen to their conscience anyway, but they trot this sort of remark out when it suits them to pickpocket the NDP for policy.

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I do have a problem with dismissing an analysis as 'laughable' without offering a counter-argument. One of the problems that authors mention - and one that I have found often here - is just this sort of incurious, reflexive attitude to policy analysis.

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Some things have no greater value than a derisive laugh.

Let's look, again, at one of the premises:

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Labour-market flexibility, deregulation of the service industry, pension reforms and greater competition in university funding might harm the interest of well-connected, privileged citizens

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And why, it must be true, as these two saintly professors, one of them from Harvard, the very ground rock of altruism, are both very well connected, privileged individuals. And yet here they are willing to "harm" their own self-interests to help those less fortunate who have been held back by the scourges of job security, retirement savings, consumer protection, and access to higher education.

They are saints!!! Bless them! Bless them!

[ 05 October 2007: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
Well, if they can convince the citizenry that TINA, then even bad economic "medicine" will be seen as necessary. Hence the absolute necessity of a coherent and distinct alternative. Chavez in Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia seem to be having some success in that regard.

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Therefore the only alternative is democracy

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Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:

Explain to me how a vague concept of a political system is the alternative to a very specific economic system, because I don't get it.

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I say the alternative to neoLiberal capitalism, which is more of an ideology, is democracy. N. Beltov points to Bolivia and Venezuela as examples. Venezuelans almost lost their democracy to fascism with a CIA-fomented coup in 2002. Tens of thousands of poor people took to the streets outside the presidential palace in support of Hugo Chavez and basically his life. The fascists likely would have killed him at some point otherwise.

And it appears to me that President Chavez has done his best since then to govern for the people of Venezuela and has rejected the economic prescriptions for liberalizing the economy. A similar people's revolution is happening in Bolivia with the richest and most powerful in those countries claiming, of all things, that the popular leaders are actually fascists and Hitlerian dictators. Meanwhile, the pro-rich people news media continue broadcasting anti-Chavez propaganda, and rich people continue living in their mansions and living a very good life.

But those Scandinavian and Northern European economies are lightyears ahead of most of Latin America, like Nicaragua where the neoLiberal experience was corruption and soaring rates of poverty and illiteracy throughout the ideologically driven Washington consensus 1990's. It will take a country like Nicaragua two to three generations of sustained socialism to achieve the level of health and literacy that exists in Cuba today.

And, I doubt very much that there is a socio economic hypothesis that can't point to actual examples. There is nothing new under the sun.

For example, we have the kind of University system in Canada that the authors above point to. It hardly rewards the poor at the expense of the wealthy. In fact, Canada's University system can only be regarded as fair or successful from a social Darwinists point of view.

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
I have no problem with an inheritance tax.

I do have a problem with dismissing an analysis as 'laughable' without offering a counter-argument. One of the problems that authors mention - and one that I have found often here - is just this sort of incurious, reflexive attitude to policy analysis.

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"But the myth of the free-market Miracle persists because it serves a quasi-religious function. Within the faith of the Reaganauts and Thatcherites, Chile provides the necessary genesis fable, the ersatz Eden from which laissez-faire dogma sprang successful and shining." -- Greg Palast

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Originally posted by RosaL:

I didn't see any argument in the article referenced - just the old familiar assertions. So it's not particularly inappropriate to respond with counter-assertions.

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Your right in your assertion except that I would argue that this article warrants some attention from the Canadian left if only because it seems as though this sort of argument is not openly mainstream amongst Canada's left. At least not by my reckoning.

As near as I can tell, this kind of logic is much newer to Canadian centre-left thought by my reckoning. For example, I have yet to hear about any plans for the NDP (Canada's left centre party with representation) here in Canada to talk about introducing market practices into the health care system (if anyone knows of any examples to the contrary, please do not hesitate to say so). Although they have caved on a number of other fronts as far as neo-liberal policies go, they still have a residue of social democratic thought which is exemplified in the way in which they fight for free market fantasy free health care.

What is far more interesting, is that even the parties who are not inherently social democratic and not necessarily inclined to defend 'not for profit' health care are still claiming that they are keeping the private sector out of the health care system even though they have been going on a terror of P3s since they came to office (I'm thinking of the Ontario Liberal Party here).

That really tells us two things.

The first is that the neo-liberal agenda still has not penetrated the minds of those who are enacting the reforms. Well, it has, except no one realizes it, or is honest enough to admit it. They still believe that they are keeping the private sector out of the public health care system, even though they are doing the exact opposite. I have observed this curious phenomenon up close as of late here in Ontario by listening to Deb Matthews speak about how her government is supposedly defending public health care. To Deb's credit, I believe that she actually believes that she is defending public health care, even though she isn't. There is a very interesting force at work here, and I will go into that in a moment. For now, let us remember that as it stands right now, they are still of the mind that public health care is actually a good thing and worth fighting for. This tells us that even our centre in Canada has yet to completely "drink the kool-aid" as I am so fond of saying.

The reason for this at it's most cynical is that polls will constantly tell them that they're cooked if they give up on public health care. But for people like Deb, she doesn't need a poll to tell her that public health care is right, she believes it in her heart. At least, that's the impression that I get. The disconnect comes when she has to vote on bills which will close agreements with private sector organizations to run our hospitals. I suspect that Deb does not truly appreciate the gravity of what she is putting her name to, because these sorts of operations are the very essence of for profit health care and completely anathema to true public service delivery.

The Ontario government has made many other examples of this neo-liberal ideology such as their completing the Mike Harris agenda of outsourcing the game tag system at the Ministry of Natural Resources. I'm quite certain that they have outsourced a number of other small iniatives which used to be private sector operations, but that is all I am able to come up with at present.

Now that we have come to disconnect between the defence of public services while privatizing them, one should note the astonishing amount of stupidity, naivety, crass indifference, or perhaps outright diabolical forces at work here.

Perhaps it is apropriate for us to ask ourselves how is it possible for a person to think they are defending public services, when in fact, they are selling it up the river?

Its not really "liberalism" anyhow, not as it developed in the twentieth century, when reformers started to recognise laissez faire's inherent instability and the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of putting property rights before human ones --or insisting that one naturally leads to the other as the 'neos' prefer to do.

The article wasn't much beyond the usual life-blind assertions though, so maybe it doesn't deserve much in return.

[ 06 October 2007: Message edited by: EriKtheHalfaRed ]

This cannot be understated because it gives us hope that people still believe in social democratic ideas.

I believe that it is the task of those on the left who legitimately champion these ideas to continue to hammer away at the fact that people are not getting what they want while they're being told they are. This isn't about exposing liars or cheats, it's about telling people that if they want what they say the want, then they cannot trust the current old line parties to do it, because they've proven that they cannot be trusted to do it.

To bring this around to the election, I believe that Howard Hampton has maybe one day left to make this clear to the voters of Ontario.

And he should be sure to harp on memes such as "trust."

Everyone knows that Dalton McGuinty is a shameless liar. This is not something that will carry anymore sway with voters.

What will carry far more sway is to harp away at the fact that Dalton McGuinty is not trustworthy as premier. He cannot be trusted with the health care system because he has proven that when he has control of it, he continues to privatize it.

Dalton McGuinty cannot be trusted with the public purse because he abuses it by not protecting the lottery system. He abuses it by making slush funds to reward Liberal Party friends.

Dalton McGuinty cannot be trusted to keep his word because he said he was not going to raise taxes, but he did.

Dalton McGuinty cannot be trusted because he said he wouldn't privatize health care, but he is.

Dalton McGuinty cannot be trusted because he said he would do a lot of things, but he didn't because he was too busy pandering to his fat cat friends.

HAHAHAHA!!!!

Solving problems through more competition is a typically male solution to resolving just about anything. Economics, the courts, and elections are all premised upon competition. Although competition is one option for dealing with problems, in the end it never really resolves anything except to maintain systems of competitiveness.

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Originally posted by EriKtheHalfaRed:
Its not really "liberalism" anyhow, not as it developed in the twentieth century, when reformers started to recognise laissez faire's inherent instability and the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of putting property rights before human ones --or insisting that one naturally leads to the other as the 'neos' prefer to do.
[ 06 October 2007: Message edited by: EriKtheHalfaRed ]

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or, as the classical liberals would put it: the other way round

Locke put property rights near the very top of the list of freedoms, as the guarantor of a private sphere of life against the intrusion of the political sphere;

and Jefferson took note: the first draft of the Declaration of Independence spoke of "life, liberty and the pursuit of property" (which was struck out - you can see the plume marks on parchment copies -- and revised to "... pursuit of happiness", over several delegates' objections)

for the classical liberals, then, THAT is liberalism, individual freedom and private property;
but in the U.S. in the 20th century -- prompted by the disrepute of the term "progressive" after Teddy, and the determination of FDR not to be labelled socialist -- the terms "liberalism" and "liberal" came to mean left-centre, denoting something quite different from what, say, Hayek or Mies mean by it

that was the change in vocabulary that Friedman et cie challenged in the 1970s and after, basically a return to roots that here in western Europe was not a change:
"liberal" and "liberalisme" are still the biggest derogatory term in France used by anti-globalizers and the local Naomi Kleins, and no "neo" needed

[ 11 October 2007: Message edited by: Geneva ]

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The point is that liberalism opposes privileges that are enjoyed by the few at the expense of the the poor and marginalised.

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Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
I am entirely earnest. What is depressing is that you believe that hokum.

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I reread that a couple times. I can't believe he (i.e., SG) means it.

[ 11 October 2007: Message edited by: RosaL ]

Just food for thought, I’m not making any predictions. While I agree that the people of Venezuela have suffered (and in many cases undoubtedly still do), I don’t know for certain that it can be primarily blamed on liberalism. I bet it can be blamed on cronyism, elitism and corruption to name a few things. Those are hardly traits that have only been displayed by neo-liberals, however. It remains to be seen how successful Hugo Chavez will be until we’ve had a chance to objectively review the outcome of his social and economic policies.

Additionally, while I don’t “buy” most of what the late Milton Friedman stood for, I think it’s important to read more into his theories, statements/comments on various topics. Not for the sake of saying “Oh yes, he was right” but for the sake of trying to understand what he was saying. Many people have a tendency to blame Friedman for the disaster that took place in Chile during the Pinochet years and to take his comments about Chile’s structural reform out of context. Pinochet & the Chicago Club didn’t implement all free market reforms and they made an enormous mistake when they pegged the Chilean currency at 69 Pesos per US dollar. I don’t know a great deal about Chilean history, but I highly doubt Pinochet had anyone’s best interest in mind besides his own when he committed mass murder and sold off state assets. I’m not sure how Friedman can be blamed for that – he recommended privatization across the board, but does anyone have a direct quote of Friedman recommending that governments steal public money and murder people? It’s kind of like blaming Karl Marx for Stalin’s neglect and murder of millions of Ukrainians or Mao’s neglect of his own people and their subsequent deaths, isn’t it? I’m not saying it’s exactly the same, but it seems analogous to me some how.

I would generalize to say that any economy that has tried to control it’s currency since the removal of the gold standard has suffered for it. The UK took a beating on Black Wednesday in ‘92 when George Soros decided to exploit weaknesses in management of the UK pound. We likely all remember the Asian Financial Crisis of ’97, the Mexian Peso Crisis, or the Argentinean economic crisis of the 1990’s. All of these crises had one thing in common; mucking around with currencies. I’m not saying it was the sole cause of any of the crises, because it wasn’t. But it played a major role in Chile’s drastic recession in the 1980’s, cost the UK over 2 billion pounds in 1 day in ’92 and added fuel to the fire that were dysfunctional economies in Asia and parts of Latin America (Mexico and Argentina to name 2 countries).

A lot of these problems can’t be neatly categorized under “A right-wing” problem just like a lot of short-comings with the former USSR or other communist countries can’t be neatly categorized under a “Communist” or “Socialist” problem or shortcoming. The issues are far more complex and inter-related than most people (pundits or otherwise) care to admit or explore.

Frustrated Mess, I think Stephen missed the fact that you used “Liberalism” and not “liberalism.” I agree that “Liberalism” is about protecting the privileges of economic and social elites. I disagree that small-l liberalism is about the same; it’s no more about keeping a boot on someone’s neck than socialism is.

I’m not saying I buy all the arguments made under neo-liberal philosophy, but I don’t buy all the arguments made under socialism either. It’s easy for any of us to pick apart certain aspects of any philosophy or ideology because none of them is perfect. People who speak out for the sake of trying to stir debate and to try and get others thinking make easy targets, regardless of their ideology or philosophy; I would venture to guess it’s a major reason why a lot of people don’t speak out. In an increasingly complex world, it’s probably next to impossible to lump the “perfect” system under any one ideology, philosophy or political framework for that matter. Perhaps I’ll develop my own philosophy/ideology and call it “Awesomeness.”

To speak for myself, I believe in a lot of things: pure socialism (or social democracy for that matter) and pure liberalism is neither of them. I believe strongly in some type of wealth redistribution to assist those less fortunate then us and to try and decrease economic inequities in our society. Do I know how to achieve that – of course not, I have ideas, but they’re hardly dogma that most ideologues tend to spew like some kind of religious sermon. I also place more “stock” in the ability of people to choose for themselves what is best for them than I do in the ability of governments to provide for them and/or decide what’s best for them. Sure there are exceptions – but those exceptions sway either way.

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Originally posted by 2 ponies:
I wonder how Chavez would fund his social programs if more than 50% of his government revenues weren’t coming from petroleum royalties and various state owned enterprises. What would happen if CITGO was denied access to the US market given that their revenues are about US $32

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The Republican cabal would have to bomb another oil-rich country in the Middle East. The USSA's is the most oil-addicted, most energy-intensive and most wasteful economy in the world as well as being the most unsustainable. They can't say no to any oil source.

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It seems clear from this thread that a lot of people aren’t trying to think “differently”, but have a preconceived notion of what is “best” and what isn’t.

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That is certainly true. Some babblers are stuck in a time warp, circa 1952.

Still, they are right that Chavez is preferable to most of the Venezuelan presidents of the past century, most of whom spread the oil revenues among a small elite, and left the majority in great poverty.

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Originally posted by jeff house:

That is certainly true. Some babblers are stuck in a time warp, circa 1952.

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The War on Democracy an excellent John Pilger video featuring Venezuela. One thing that's not so visible from the video of the barrios are the green and white plastic pipes criss-crossing the hillsides. The pipes carry water and sewage to and from the modest homes.

Those elitist bastards who fight like mad to oppress others are not believers of freedom. The things people will do to acquire power over others - really sick stuff. I can't imagine what fundamentalists like that former CIA latin american chief tell themselves to justify the deaths of so many people. "For national security." I guess freedom and equality are a small price to pay for national security......

[ 17 October 2007: Message edited by: 2 ponies ]

In economic terms, "liberal" or "liberalized" has zip to do with progressive politics and everything to do with making it easier for rich people to make more money, and harder for everyone else to just get by. It also increasingly destabilizes the wonderful world of Casino Capitalism.

Ever since Nixon floated the dollar in the early 70s, the North American economy has become increasing tied to the whims of investors and stock market speculators whose decision-making is based on greed and fear. We now have a major recession every 5 to 10 years.

Remember the big recession of the early 80s? Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney - all hugely supporting market liberalization - headed up governments that played key roles in increasing human misery when the economy went down the crapper, due to their support of economic "liberalization". These right-wing assholes went on a spree of union-busting, cutting vast swaths of funding from social service budgets, and generally contributing to child poverty and urban violence.

It's real simple SG. With increasing deregulation of the market economy, investors get fat on impossibly inflated (and unstable) markets, then they cut and run, leaving a big fucking mess when it all collapses in on itself. Who deals with that mess? Working people, people in the manufacturing sector. A mere 4 years after the people whose lives were devastated by the big whomping recession of the early 80s, everything went to shit again. Between 1989 and 1993, and estimated 200,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector disappeard. The term "downsizing" became part of the lexicon of the workplace, and all the service industries whose goods were no longer affordable for the recently unemployed - more job loss.

A couple years into recovery from that mess, the eastern economy collapses. Indonesian, Malaysian and Japanes economies were vastly inflated, with nothing but bad credit to sustain them. On this side of the Pacific, we were more affected by the great big dot com bubble that made a handful of computer geeks and a load of investers bazillionaires overnight. When the bubble burst, all of those new IT jobs disappeared, companies went under, people got screwed. Again.

A liberalizing a market economy, with stunningly consistent predictability, is always bad news in a world run by greedy, stupid, myopic, self-serving parasites. That's the world I know.

Thanks for the fairy tale SG, but as serious analyses go, it's a big load of shite.

[ 18 October 2007: Message edited by: Rebecca West ]

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
The point is that liberalism opposes privileges that are enjoyed by the few at the expense of the the poor and marginalised. Since all-too-many self-described leftists are all-too-easily persuaded to attack anything that smacks of freer markets, insiders who wish to preserve their privileges need only to mouth a few catch-phrases in order to get their support.

The sad result is one in which self-described progressives end up defending policies that are actually regressive.

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That may be the point the professors are making but it's just too fuckin' dumb to seriously consider. No, really, these guys are professors? Liberalism opposes privileges that are enjoyed by the few? WHO was the prime minister of Italy until recently? And they still trot out this cant? I guess they're at Harvard because it's not selling in Italy.

The neo-liberal experiment across the west has uniformly degraded the commons, widened the class divide and concentrated wealth in the hands of a miniscule elite. This assertion is NOT some knee-jerk ideological position, contrary to some comments on this board but based on lots and lots of really proper scientific studies and analysis that I'm damned if I'm going to dig up links for here.

Apparently it was the CIA's fault for dragging neocons into a costly war with Iraq. They basically marched into another country and waged war on poor people and declared local people living there the enemies of freedom and democracy. Palecons are the mafia-like muscle behind right-wing neoLiberal ideology.

usury + mafia w/nukes = "free market economy"

[ 18 October 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

The Afghan, El Salvador, and Iraq Elections:
U.S. managed elections, with the threat of violence, are called "democratic" Edward S Herman is an important author on the left. Herman co-authored "Manufacturing Consent" with Noam Chomsky

The alternative to neoLiberal ideology, which is enforced by vicious U.S. imperialism around the world, is democracy!

[ 18 October 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Individualism is a knife’s edge worldview. It can be beneficial or destructive. In the Aboriginal Issues and Culture section I’d posted that I disagreed with using the term democracy to describe certain indigenous practices as being democratic in nature. The reason for that was the ideological “baggage” that comes with democracy. The ideological baggage that I don’t like is this notion of individualism.

The importance of individualism is what can bully our compassion for others. I would suggest that you use the notion of democracy as a stage of development. Not a final solution. Beyond individualism there’s family and community. And beyond that, the rest of the environment. Which I believe are more critically important that any individual. I’m slowly beginning to understand my Indigenous culture’s understandings and their impacts on things like economics. And I only know that they were very different from what we understand as economics today.

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Originally posted by sknguy:
I respect your belief in democracy Fidel. And I recognize and respect entirely what you mean. But might I suggest the following? The concept of democracy was born from the same ideological tree that bore liberalism. Society would need to be diligent that it not slip back upon a liberal ideology were it to be replaced with something else. The two ideas are closely linked, which is conveniently why the concepts of rights and democracy are on a colonialist agenda for export.

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Right, I agree with you. Maybe what I should have said was, a country or people should have the right to determine their own form of democracy without outside political interference by a vicious empire forcing U.S.-managed elections on whichever international port capitalist dogs decide they should want to cock up their hind legs.

When they talk about bootstraps, personal initiative, badmouthing the nanny state, they mean it for everybody except the rich folks. They're all too happy to keep the tax breaks coming for people who make millions of dollars a year, and to keep the government welfare checks... oh, sorry, targeted subsidies, coming to the corporations that already rake in huge profits every year.

But woe to the small business owner that wants the government to preferentially give him or her a tax holiday so he can get one up on the competition!

Woe to the welfare recipient trying to live on $510 (or is it $560? I just about fell over when I heard the cheap bastards actually raised welfare rates) a month, daring to tell the government it's not giving away enough money to keep poor people alive!

"Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us" is the motto of those elites you claim try to capture leftist support.

If there's a reason why people like me favor interventionist tendencies even when there are sizable costs associated with them, it's because at least in a democratic system we have the ability to change who can do the intervening.

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Originally posted by DrConway:
SG, what you forgot is that most "elites that want to keep insider privilege" are political conservatives all in favor of classical liberalism... for the little guy.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
Think about foreign-ownership rules: the only people who benefit from them are CEOs who never ever have to worry about new owners coming in and demanding better performance.

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