prole

The question bears repeating: what kind of freedom allows the kind of massive growth and consolidation of wealth and power, the rigidification of class inequalities, and the near-paralysis in our ability to solve urgent and growing problems? What kind of freedom reduces humanity's better instincts and aspirations to "stuff" that the people with access can "appreciate" over a glass of wine (or coconut water) while computers and bond-traders decide how to run society? We've traded politics, progress, and the expansion of our definition of freedom for efficiency targets and "consumer choice" while real power becomes more concentrated and the access to education, health, space becomes more restricted to the ability to pay? Where does the will to solve problems that impact us collectively come from in this configuration? "Market democracy" has failed us; it's failed in the conflagration of the financial collapse, it's failing us in the deepening crises it's caused, it's failing us in our ability to address the mounting ecological catastrophe and in our ability to exercise control over a bloated national security state at home and abroad. Trading away an engagement with our collective future by narrowly defining freedom as lifestyle consumption is a grotesque perversion which you need to address Jay, if only through an explication of your irrational fear of "the mob" and your dogged defense of an increasingly indefensible status quo.

Do you have a scatter plot for the Failed State/Neolib Shock Treatment nexus?

It is good to see Bahrain's still in the top ten. And Singapore (I don't really chew gum anyway).

Dude, it's like, subjective.

"Appreciation"? Stop playing the dullard.

Yeah well, people as dull as you are easy to please I guess. Ten thousand years of human civilization, five hundred years of the Enlightenment, philosophy, literature, scientific exploration, the limits of consciousness and the totality of your vision for society, for politics, ethics, human progress consists of this corny, reductionist, banal horseshit about buying a car? [video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VscVP_Gt_s&feature=related

They're both unwatchable.

Know who's really, really glad for the existence of Fox News? Jon Stewart!

...and gaining speed.

Oh, they most certainly did. We just called it deregulation, privatization, corporate offshoring, union-busting, and tax cuts. Too subjective for you?

right, you want to ignore data that invalidates your conclusions and focus only on those with which to foist your agenda on others. I forgot to laugh at you about this...

-It's clearly subjective. In my personal definition, the less statutory restraints there are on your ability to earn and spend money in ways that don't directly harm anyone else, the more economic freedom you have. I meant specifically.

right, you want to ignore data that invalidates your conclusions and focus only on those with which to foist your agenda on others. Yes, why bother looking at how policies effect actually existing living people and the environment, when you can DO THE MATH?!

"Economic freedom". Sounds great, what is it exactly?

2008? Ironic, huh? I've never been interested in simply looking at wishy-washy, disaggregated measures of "economic performance" abstracted from health, education, equality of opportunity, mobility, and other social indicators that do much better at measuring benefits to society and environment as a whole.

"In a March paper for the Council on Foreign Relations, Nobel laureate economist Michael Spence and New York University researcher Sandile Hlatshwayo argue that Germany’s success at building a booming manufacturing sector that constitutes almost twice the share of the economy that ours does is largely the result of “a broad agreement among business, labor and government” to keep wages competitive and high-value-added production at home. Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, also attributes Germany’s overwhelmingly positive trade balance and comparatively low unemployment rate (7 percent) to that tripartite system. David Leonhardt, the New York Times economics columnist, wrote last week that Germany owed its edge in global competitiveness to a range of policies that could not be more different than ours: limiting homeownership, improving education (including vocational and technical education) and keeping unions strong — which is why “middle-class pay,” he noted, “has risen at roughly the same rate as top incomes.” This growing appreciation of the German model is a welcome change from the laissez-faire approach to globalization that has dominated U.S. policy and discourse for decades, dooming many Rust Belt denizens to lives of crystal meth and quiet desperation. But some of these analyses still understate the crucial distinctions between Germany’s stakeholder capitalism, which benefits the many, and our shareholder capitalism, which increasingly benefits only the few." -- Washington Post 6/15/11

Why the dodge? There's no need to resort to foggy generalizations; Germany's record under 30 years of neoliberal globalization is quite clear: rejecting the race to the bottom and free market fundamentalism is working. Oops?

We've covered this ground before in the campaign finance reform thread. The issue isn't "limiting state power", it's dealing with the huge disparity in access to it. It's not about tariffs, subsidies, and tax-exemptions on principle (at various times and places they've been the cornerstone of economic development), it's about who they benefit. As long as there is a need to enact and enforce laws, whether it's through a nation-state or the PTA, there will be incentive to rig the game. Since, at this point in human evolution it's obvious we still need laws and organizational mechanisms to express our collective will, promote our interests, and resolve conflicts, in other words engage in politics, we need government. Sorry, your market utopia is a pipe-dream. Power will exist regardless of the instruments through which it is exercised. Doing away with the modern liberal democratic state doesn't do away with power, it does away with the citizenry's capacity to curb it. Liberal democracies within capitalism at least offer the potential to limit the exercise of power by the economically powerful over the less powerful through oversight, regulation, etc. Drowning our government in the bathtub doesn't dispel power, it abdicates it to those who already have power in society. That our own government has been highjacked by capital doesn't mean government is essentially corrupt in principle, it means that greater balance need to be brought to the political field. But really, what did happen to the role of democracy in liberal thought, Jay? Are so cynical to think that the dysfunctional American system is proof of the corruption of any form of governance or are you so dazzled by the mathematical certainty of your models or convinced by the pure visions of wizened little Austrians that you're incapable of seeing how spectacularly free-market fundamentalism is failing us? I'd be the last guy to argue for dismantling the legal architecture of liberalism/liberal-democracy - it's good stuff. All I'm arguing for is getting rid of or minimizing as many of the instruments that the big monkeys "the powerful" can get their hands on to run to manipulate the market and/or society in a manner that's to their liking. Getting rid of prohibition, various exemptions from competition, and handouts of public money to private economic interests in whatever form would be a good start. I think that the key difference in our perspective is that I don't exclude people who get paid via tax revenues from the list of private economic interests who have an incentive to funnel as much of the public dough as possible into their own hands. Anyone who can look at a legislative session in California and conclude that, say, the Prison Guards Union is any less self interested than ExxonMobil has a primitive innocence about them that would make Rousseau do a double take. Is it *really* surprising that programs that ostensibly started out to help the little guy (in the dubious conventional narrative) - like farm subsidies - wound up being gorged on by massive agribusiness cartels? That programs intended to promote things like "home ownership" metastasized into a financial/construction cartel that siphoned off public money transferred the risk back onto the public till? Etc, etc, etc. Add "Energy Independence," "Home Ownership," "The Children," etc to the list of nostrums that scoundrels hide behind. Large concentrations of economic power can and will manipulate the levers within the political sphere as long as they have access to the control room. As I said, I don't have a problem with subsidies and other forms of protection on principle. No modern nation-state ever successfully industrialized without them. There are any number of fledgling industries and projects that could use the breaks currently turning into money shoveled into Exxon shareholders' pockets. How the money is used is a matter of transparency, oversight, and enforcement. None of these have been high priorities for a government captured, at least partially through campaign financing, by the very industries its supposed to regulate. Why assume the historical inevitability of a wind cartel or an electric car cartel because our oil companies have used policy to their advantage in the past? Look instead of the vast gains those industries made, recognize those resources could be better used elsewhere, limit fraud, abuse, and undue access to the political system, and get this fucking show on the road. I am, admittedly, a partisan. I think we do, as a society, have the capacity and the information available to make good choices in certain areas about where we can make investments in our future and guide industrial policies that can provide broad benefits to our society. It's not necessary to invoke the screaming meemies (CENTRAL PLANNING!) every time someone says this. The Germans have essentially "beat" the race to the bottom by investing in and "protecting" their workers and doing the opposite of what free market utopians told them they had to do. It's hard not to think we got duped.

We've covered this ground before in the campaign finance reform thread. The issue isn't "limiting state power", it's dealing with the huge disparity in access to it. It's not about tariffs, subsidies, and tax-exemptions on principle (at various times and places they've been the cornerstone of economic development), it's about who they benefit. As long as there is a need to enact and enforce laws, whether it's through a nation-state or the PTA, there will be incentive to rig the game. Since, at this point in human evolution it's obvious we still need laws and organizational mechanisms to express our collective will, promote our interests, and resolve conflicts, in other words engage in politics, we need government. Sorry, your market utopia is a pipe-dream. Power will exist regardless of the instruments through which it is exercised. Doing away with the modern liberal democratic state doesn't do away with power, it does away with the citizenry's capacity to curb it. Liberal democracies within capitalism at least offer the potential to limit the exercise of power by the economically powerful over the less powerful through oversight, regulation, etc. Drowning our government in the bathtub doesn't dispel power, it abdicates it to those who already have power in society. That our own government has been highjacked by capital doesn't mean government is essentially corrupt in principle, it means that greater balance need to be brought to the political field. But really, what did happen to the role of democracy in liberal thought, Jay? Are so cynical to think that the dysfunctional American system is proof of the corruption of any form of governance or are you so dazzled by the mathematical certainty of your models or convinced by the pure visions of wizened little Austrians that you're incapable of seeing how spectacularly free-market fundamentalism is failing us?

Yes, cynicism coupled with paranoia is a key feature of the current American social scene and is evident across the political spectrum.

They are certainly more frequent than in the post-Depression era preceding the global financial liberalization and deregulation! Funny how that happens when those factions capture state power... Are you ever going to address the tax-evasion that everyone but you seems willing to recognize is part of the problem?

Fair enough, but these crises have grown in frequency, severity, and scope as a result of the financial liberalization, hot money flows, tax-offshoring associated with neoliberal globalization. Europe is simply the latest to experience what numerous countries in SE Asia and Latin America have already been through just in the last decade and a half that have had global repercussions. It's nice for you to have the Greek welfare state to scapegoat but the structural issues are far broader as you already know.

It's called default. Oddly, people act like it's never happened before, despite the fact that it's been a mainstay of neoliberal capitalism.

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