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http://pensionpulse.blogspot.com/2010/05/end-of-welfare-states.html
Thank you,
Leo Kolivakis
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Sophistication has nothing to do with it. I dont remember saying anything like that.
What were the first lifeforms on earth? Bacteria or precursor. While these may seem complex, they are nothing compared to the biological ladder which developed from those first lifeforms.
So life started out relatively simple and became more complex as time progressed, enviroments changed etc...
So there is a direction to evolution. That doesnt mean anything divine is leading its hand. Its just nature.
There is "a" direction to evolution until the direction changes, because the environment changes. Massive extinctions are the norm across the history of life on this planet. The most successful products of evolution are still the simplest ones, single-celled creatures that you find just about everywhere from deep ocean vents to your own gut: the single cell creatures in your guts outnumber the count of your own cells massively.
I'm not into semantic games :-) Evolution's direction is clearly biased towards more complexity as in primates --) humans etc...
A=A
Ignore it at your own peril.
Post of the day so far.
This is one of the side effects of the "avoid liquidation of overpriced risk assets (including bad bank debts) at any cost" policy, which you yourself have been advocating ad nauseam here Leo. As AnonymousMonetarist puts it, "failure to liquidate the insolvent banksters will lead to liquidation of a major part of the productive economy."
It's a big shit sandwich on the table and someone will have to take the bite. Since you don't think it should be the holders of risky assets and you also don't think it should be the welfare state, what *should* it be?
I agree. Leo seems to think that bank bailouts are not of the same symptom of that of welfare states. Same thing, rewarding failure, stupidity, laziness, greed, and unproductivity.
Good. I hope welfare states get a clue that the majority of the working population is sick and tired of bailing out losers, whether they be banks, or useless lazy chronic unemployed.
Sure there needs to be a saftey net for those that genuinely cannot help themselves, but the majority of humans on this planet can get a job and pay taxes like the rest of us.
You presume that the unemployed are all lazy if they're that way over a long term. They aren't going to respond unless they have an imperative to work, or an incentive to work. Guess which one gets implemented and which one actually solves the problem.
No matter how, you'll be paying for them. The better idea would be to make it possible for them to choose work out of their own volition. No, temporary work only gives you the chronically unemployed you dislike so much.
Or you could not complain about the near-endless welfare they get.
totally agree but their plan is welfare for the bottom AND the top.. sloth is running deep on both ends
Where's cheeky w/futures charts?
...damn, right when the action gets good too.
It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.
kafka
we all must bow to the fat and lazy
the "fuck you obey me"
"oh why do they hate me?" (who me?)
only two generations away
from the world's most despicable slavery trade
pioneered so many ways to degrade a human being
that it cant be changed to this day
legacy so ingrained
in the way that we think
we no longer need chains to be slaves
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO18F4aKGzQ
Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait.
Or someone built a better mousetrap, and patented that, and reinvested the profits to make further innovations. Is it a crime to build a better mousetrap? To offer a better product or service? Or is it just a crime to make profits from it?
The welfare state is mortally dependent on demographics to keep its Ponzi going. The 'Boomers have legislated themselves endless benefits at the cost of the young and the unborn. Indentured Generation Y will return the favor by emigrating, going on strike or otherwise withholding their production. Reform is a non-starter. Until total bankruptcy of the state lifts the collectivist yoke, the economy will languish. The cradle of democracy (and corruption), Greece, is a bellwether.
I'm admittedly no trained economist, and maybe that's for the better. It seems that ANY government reguylation/tinkering can only further screw things up...let the rentiers run free!
There is a saying: "anything that is stupid enough to find itself balanced on the edge of a cliff deserves to be pushed". If most economic actors in today's world find themselves dependent on continued cheap credit, reliant on rolling over debt, or paying today's wages from tomorrow's...whose fault is that? If welfare states have made themselves by redistributing wealth - much of which doesn't even exist in any tangible, non-paper form - and now find it unsustainable, doesn't that say something about the lack of actuarial acumen in the system? Shouldn't these be toppled?
Doesn't all of it tell us anything about personal responsibility? About the folly of relying on others to regulate, to punish, to pay out? Where is due diligence before investing? What happened to a healthy dose of caveat emptor?
Unbridled capitalism is a naturally-derived construct. It is the closest civilized manifestation of the state of nature that we all in fact live in. We are all just two hands and a brain away from food riots, fighting, weapons and a struggle for resources only because we live in (still) a world of apparent abundance. I fear that when the clothes of civilization are stripped away reality is likely to be for many nasty, brutish and short.
But even welfarism, redistribution, funny money, printing/QE, inflation and borrowing can never hide the fact that resources are not abundant enough to permit nations of idle six-week-holiday lounge-lizards.
Work and you shall eat. No government anywhere can produce real wealth from nothing...
Unbridled capitalism is a naturally-derived construct. It is the closest civilized manifestation of the state of nature that we all in fact live in.
Are you a spokesperson for BP? That's unbridled capitalism, with externalities that the human race pays for, not the capitalist entity, with damage beyond repair at any price.
Go back to your philosophy books and look up sociopath. That's unbridled capitalism that acts only in its own interest with no concern for the havoc it may wreak.
There is no ONE system of human nature that we all can live with. There are only ideologies that lead to that conclusion. Human nature is not an isolated condition under one framework. It is a complex web that requires checks and balances, consequences, and yes, real regufuckinglation.
Good Howard!
"real regufuckinglation"!
BP and its oil spill problems have nothing to do with unbridled capitalism any more than you dropping the bowling ball on your toe.
BP is in business to deliver a product to customers. Their costs just went way up. Competitors who did not have the screw up will be advantaged. You injured your toe screwing around in an unsafe way and won't be able to pull plow. Someone else will get your job. Look for bowling ball recipes.
without the agendas of every liberal tree-hugging group, BP would have been drilling at depths of 100 feet and this spill would never have occurred.
Amen to that!
Howard,
BP is a private company in name only. It was a British-owned company for most of its history. It exists thanks to state protectionism and subsidy.
The GOMEX is largely publicly-owned, making damages much more complicated to assign than if it were private.
Statism is unbridled tyranny. Capitalism (the unknown ideal - not the fake system we have) respects property rights.
OK, how about Transocean (RIG) and Halliburton--the Iraq Oil suckers with Dick Cheney's intact stock while VP when we went to war in Iraq?
I call Halliburton part of the Military Industrial Complex. RIG is just a faulty machinery maker that is in collusion with BP in a finger pointing game.
- See Apostate's previous reply
"thanks to state protectionism and subsidy" , as well as limits on liability. These are not examples of "unfettered capitalism". These are government-advantaged entities - all. Mercantilism, Corporatism, Fascism come to mind.
I'm SOOOOO...tired of everyone whining about how they are the victims and anyone with capital, anyone taking advantage of others or anyone not making a buck thru sweating labour is some kind of villain.
But the masses love it. Attack the evil bankers, who took our money! Only they never had any real money in the first place...
Shangri-la will never be possible, even with all the social-welfare, redistributionist, social-justice claptrap simply because there can be no real wealth creation without not only labour, but also capital, risk and, yes, exploitation.
Maybe the reason you are sooo tired is that you stand to benefit from this process. What is you and your families' income dependent upon? If more people were asked this and questions like this, the quality of responses will rise with their willingness to share how they stand to benefit or lose in society.
I sense you stuggle with a gap between real lived experience of different people than yourself and the darwinian theory that reaffirms your life narrative... The masses don't love it like it is some product. Instead, most people know what their problems are and do not need a translator except when it comes to money where most people are reliant on so-called experts who ran this economy into the ground. Either they did this with a purpose in mind or they are incompetent... Since many are still in their same jobs, one might drift towards Bill Black's view of fraud...
I'm SOOOO...tired of people whining about people whining about their capital, as if they'd have any without those who engage in seating labour.
Shangri-la was never possible, even with all the securitized, deregulated, overleveraged casino capitalists.
snowball777, you communist...I just made $700 tonight in that S&P casino. See? Exploiting the errors of others is essential for the system to do it's work, rewarding correct decisions and punishing sloth and passivity...
And, even if each party to a deal believes he skinned the other party, then they both can be happy!
rubbish - the only system you are fueling IS the casino but one that has outgrown the very economy that allowed it to prosper.
Please speed up the process and kill the host - then flee to China or wherever to start anew your parasitic ways
Hahahaha.
You might just get your wish, kiddo!
"Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions."— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club) Shangri-la is only possible through evolution. To say we'll never achieve paradise due to human nature is a cop out that absolves you of the responsibility to evolve and create a better world for humanity. Evolve past capital. Evolve past possession. Evolve past yourself. Reach your full potential. You are not your investment decisions. You are not your forex ledger. You are not the contents of your bank account. You are not your f#$*ing khakis.
I disagree about the exploitation. Good business pay people to do a good job. Good companies often hire the best employees by paying them more to steal them from competitors. Good employees reap the benefits of hard work and as well can reap the benefits of their integrity and loyalty by sticking with a company that respects their work, work ethic, efficiency, loyalty and creativity.
Good companies attract good workers by having a reputation of doing right by them. Word of mouth is more powerful than the propaganda.
I understand that companies can and will exploit workers but the system works even better when there is shared honesty and respect among employer and employee.
Good companies are like unicorns, especially when considering labor. Skilled workers are tolerated because the owners are often too stupid to do those jobs and the skills are rare, (high unemployment changes this game though.) Lawyers are hated because the owners cannot control them and must hire them... same with doctors. CEOs get paid a lot because industrious sociopaths are rare.
Get it? You are a wage slave or you are an owner/independant, and your wage is based on your usefulness.
that is what it all turned to - but when you see small towns do any of what you described, it gets corrected lightning quick.
It's a different game altogether to rip off people you live next to
Temporalist....
Thank you, I agree..( I like to think this is just an extension of the free market system..) I have seen it work / participated in such..
Bull. The unwinding of today's welfare states are due to their own original sin -- Ponzi style intergenerational transfers. Those who set up the welfare states used the growing population pyramid to undersell the true costs of these programs, but when the demographics turned they became unsustainable.
If these programs were set up on firm financial footings, with each generation paying their own way, then they'd be fine. Since their true costs would have been apparent from the outset the programs would have been more modest. But the founders didn't want modest, they wanted Grand. Revolutionary. Transformative. So they leveraged the taxes they could afford by tapping the growing populations to temporarily deliver solid gold benefits at plated base metal prices.
Ponzis collapse all on their own... no neoliberal tricks needed.
Remember that most of the social institutions of the New Deal were set up for the purpose of restoring employment in one fashion or another - with the devil in the details being Bretton Wood, which traded a steady rate of inflation (essentially tithe to the Fed) for full employment. At the time, the US was a modest (population-wise) but rapidly growing country shifting from an agrarian mode of living to an industrial one. The Baby Boomers were in the future, highways were in the future, the country was a net exporter, and the underlying assumption at the time was that as society evolved, so too would the response of politicians to the issues of demographics. Additionally, at the time, the idea that the US would be anything but a net exporter of oil was inconceivable.
Overall, the system worked for 30-40 years without a lot of tinkering, even though the Boomers turned out to be a far larger group than expected, even though oil production peaked in the US in 1971, even through the shift away from the gold standard and OPEC and what amounted to an orchestrated attempt to dismantle the system by Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush Jr. After nearly 70 years and the orchestrated efforts of a venal financial class its finally beginning to fall apart, but it's worth understanding that none of this was intended to last unchanged into perpetuity.
If Goldman and company hadn't started selling financial weapons of mass destruction, if Bush II and the Fed hadn't kept the overnight rate at nearly 0 for several years, actively promoted home ownership to people who buy all rights should never have been loaned to, if Bush hadn't effectively eviscerated meaningful oversight of the financial institutions, then frankly most of this would likely never have happened. We would have had a recession or two, because they are part of the business cycle, but we wouldn't have had this farce of holding the economy together with chewing gum and duct tape.
Kurt_Cagle,
Thank you for your post... it reminds me that I forget more than I remember about that dark period in our nations' history.... Well articulated!
You left out a few very important changes that hurried along our destruction.
1. The Great Society shredded the social contract of the New Deal. Workfare was out the window, and welfare went from a shameful, temporary small stipend to an extensive, and far too often long term accepted lifestyle.
2. The unionization of government destroyed the big public works project as a countercyclical workfare option. The things FDR was able to do, like the CCC, are no longer doable.
In many ways, the wheels came off during the late-60's/early-70's under the questionable stewardship of LBJ and Nixon, and most of what has occurred since has been flailing attempts to undo or deal with the damage done back then.
Somewhere along the way we lost the old social contract. An honest days pay for an honest days work has been replaced by a longing for guaranteed income level, and too many people would rather have an excuse from work than an opportunity build a life.
We've been a nation out of balance for four decades now.
1) What is this thing you have against welfare? It's worth noting that most of the welfare payments that are made in the United States pretty much for the last three decades have gone to poor women, typically undereducated, often with one or more children after a divorce or abandonment (and as often as not, white), or elderly people who never made enough over their lifetimes with social security to get more than a minimal stipend. A significant amount of that is provided today in the form of EBT cards that have strong limits on what can be purchased.
I have no doubt that there are welfare cheats out there - there isn't a system known to humankind that doesn't attract leeches - but for the most part those on welfare for the last 30-40 years prefer having a real wage, even at minimum, than what they can make on welfare. In general, when people say they are against welfare, what they are usually saying between the lines is that they are against minorities sponging off the system, stealing the taxes of whites, but saying that explicitly is likely to elicit a well deserved backlash.
Keep in mind that, adjusted for inflation, we have gone from a situation in 1960 where the top 1% of the country owned around 18% of the total wealth of the country to the present where they own 52%. Most of that has been due to the massive reallocation of wealth that has occurred within the last 20 years, both due to multiple tax give backs (which provided very little real benefit to those whose incomes were under $50K a year, but provided large benefits if your net wealth was in excess of $10 million), to investment options that are only available to the wealthy, to the stagnation of wages (again, if your net worth is >$10 million dollars, wages make up a comparatively small percentage of your overall income, but if you make <$100K, then most of your income is wage generated), and to the availability of tax havens the number of which exploded since 1980.
I suspect that the total payout from welfare over that period was miniscule in comparison to the largess provided to the financial class, and at the end of the day most corporate welfare recipients didn't have to strip out of hamburger-grease stained uniforms.
2) Unions? The last significant Federal government union action was when Reagan fired (illegally, as it turned out) the air traffic controllers and replaced them with non-union workers. Again, this is one of those wonderful right-wing myths that don't hold a lot of water when you look at the facts. Union membership has been dropping steadily since the 1950s, to the extent that now only about one person in 15 or so is a member of a union.
One of the major efforts by the banking elite of the late 1960s was the destruction of the unions; one of the others, significantly, was the co-opting of the religious Southern Democrats, which coincidentally happened to be one of the heaviest union-member population in the United States, killing two birds with one stone. Couple that with the concerted effort at exporting US manufacturing jobs that begun under Reagan - which again hit squarely at the unions, since that's where their strength was concentrated - and the rise of IT solutions and automation which also eviscerated what was left of the manufacturing sector - and what you end up with is a country where the unions have been effectively eliminated everywhere except in the public services sector.
The CCC was a 1930s solution that attempted to find a balance between providing enough employment to let people survive during the Depression and direct payments that would have discouraged the work ethic, and it had as a side effect the development of much of the initial infrastructure investments (electrical systems, dams and watershed systems, the first layer of the US highway system, expansion of ports, and so forth) that are still in use today.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was not the CCC; it was for the most part an attempt to help restart investment in critical new infrastructure technologies and advanced education; while I have some serious qualms about how a lot of these funds ended up getting allocated (primarily due to Congress, which didn't fully understand the mandate involved, I felt), overall, the investment made there were intended for long term benefits - improve the educational system, upgrade the electrical grid, invest more heavily in government information management, and putting more money into moving the country off foreign hydrocarbon dependency.
As to social contracts - any such contract is essentially an agreement on the part of the individual to forego certain things - time, taxes, the freedom to engage in perform specific actions - in order to gain something in return - security, protection and assistance when disaster or economic calamity strikes, infrastructure making it possible to perform one's work without fear for one's family, the expectation that markets are fair and non-predatory and so forth. In the US there's also been an unstated principle that justice is blind - that at least in theory a wealthy person has the same rights and responsibilities that a poor one does. In other words, each of us effectively has the same social contract vis-a-vis the government.
At the present time, the social contract for the wealthy is vastly better than the one for the poor, and it is far better for corporations than it is for individuals. If what you say about unions and the Great Society was true, you'd expect the opposite. You have banks and investment houses that have committed what is unquestionably fraud on many different fronts, but because they have been given so much power over the political process, any punishment applied to them amounts to a slap on the wrist and a fine that can be made up in a day of trading. You have oil companies that have so subverted the regulatory process that they can bypass all the safeguards and so set off an environmental disaster that will likely cost the US taxpayers well in excess of $1 trillion dollars by itself. You have almost all of the media in the country controlled by five corporations, each of which has a vested interest in maintaining the supremacy of the oligarchy.
So yes, I'd agree with you that the social contracts are broken, but I think you'll find that, for the most part, most people who can still go to work every day, in expectation that the social contract will be honored and their work (whether hard or not, but that's another debate) will be rewarded in the end by suitable compensation. Unfortunately, I think that, as do more and more people on this site and elsewhere, the ones who are really violating those social contracts aren't those welfare mamas out there, but the very icons of respectability that we have been brainwashed to believe are our best and brightest.
Kagle,
Second post better than the first!
Exactly!
Leo:
It sounds like you're saying the baby bust, and the subsequent failure to adjust the pension / social security system accordingly in Europe and elsewhere, was also caused by and part of the neoliberal agenda.
three chord sloth,
You obfuscate and don't realize the real agenda behind the greatest Ponzi scheme ever - the Pension Ponzi. This has always being about legally stealing money from labor so a few financial oligarchs can profit. It's all part of the neoliberal agenda of deregulating financial markets to allow the few at the top to amass enormous wealth of financial assets and rents.
Dearest Leo and mcelroy,
It is time to abandon ideological blindness and let the facts take you wherever they will. And the facts of the world are conservative.
Point 1. Stop pretending the mistakes of Reagan created all of the problems of today. Don't you remember the seventies? The permanent decline of all advanced industrial societies was the mainstream thought of the time, and it was embraced by most of the establishment. Plainly put: the West was dying; things could not continue the way they were. Reagan (and Thatcher) turned it around. The mistakes were of magnitude, not direction. Globalization went too far too fast, and government bloat was not cut as fast as taxes.
Point 2. Big finance and big business did not create the benefit Ponzis, they figured out how to capitalize on them. That fact does not ameliorate the pre-existing Ponzi scam.
Point 3. Sorry Leo, but I'm not some sort of no welfare libertarian ideologue. I just recognize that there are limits to what government can do; going above those limits create more problems than it solves, and pretty much every advanced nation is currently above those limits.
Point 4. Big government is inherently oppressive and intrusive. There is a label for people who fear big business more than big government -- the political class. Out here in the real world, big business is an annoyance; big government is a soul-crushing bully. The gutting of the Western middle class is primarily government driven; change the rules and the businesses will follow.
Point 5. Ideology is the god of the left. Conservatism is built from the outside in; observe the world and build a worldview from there. Liberalism is built inside the hot-house of academia; the world is then "redefined" to fit the preferred narrative.
Point 6. There is no real-world evidence that any cradle-to-grave welfare state is sustainable. It's time to stop repackaging the same-old same-old, and work to build a modest support network that doesn't crush it's host society.
3 Chord Sloth:
Refuting Point 1 - no pretending here; the economic shift towards the neoliberal turn or for those who are unfamilar with the word (neoliberal) - financialization of everything took place in latter part of the 70's... Quite right Reagan is not the cause of all of this but his administration is notable in that it was the first mouthpiece for the financial oligarchs; The west was not dying, but the banks were... As Walter Wriston said it didn't take a genius to figure out that we were soon to be bankrupt pay interest in teens but unable to charge customers more than 12% because of the usury laws... Thus South Dakota & Delaware became financial epicenters due to the exportation of interest rates across state lines decision brought to us by the Marquette Decision... Before going any further, it must be noted that government's partnership with business is almost indistinguishable (one good recommendation that confirms this is Confessions of Economic Hit Man by John Perkins)... refuting point 1 - acknowledges some pieces of your comment but really challenges two assumptions - the western society was dying (It wasn't; it was changing demographically) 2 - Our financial system needed to change (right about the same time credit became cheap and massive amounts of advertising/marketing consumption under the guise of conspicuous capitalism...
Refuting Point 2: Latin American Currency Crisis, S&L Crisis, Hyperbolic Stock Market, Enron, Dot-Com Bubble, Predatory Lending practices, Bernie Madoff, WorldCom, Sub-prime Lending leading to Financial Crisis... The one consistent piece here is that in a de-regualtory environment ----- the abuser in this example is the corporation while the government is the enabler... They work together in the system to perpetrate financial abuse on consumers and then try to cover it up (false reforms of regulation, false promises, revising events to fit circumstances, and blaming the victim... Ultimately, it doesn't matter who is most to blame is that this abuse be acknowledged, fixed and not allowed to occur... And since many of the financial abusers have not been held accountable, then you get people like yourself who have vested interest in perpetrating some economic fantasy rather than fixing injustices that occur
Refuting Point 3 - You make sense here...however, it is important to recognize our alignment as consumers with government gives us more collective voice than with industry. The two collective powers: vote box and consumer $
Refuting Point 4 - Yes it can be oppressive and instrusive, no doubt! Knowing the history of what happens when government works well and when it doesn't should be your focus not simplistic labels like big, intrusive or bad... Just say what it is: you don't want to be told what to do... Say it! Be proud of it! But then, when there is a mining accident or an oil spill, don't just blame government regulation when the whole system has been gutted over the past two decades.. If we are to take credit for when things go well in our world then we must as Roosevelt said take paternity for those mistakes... BP Oil, Iraq War, & on; the gutting of the middle class is not government driven; Elizabeth Warren (pre-eminent scholar on the middle class at Harvard disagrees with your premise: read her books: Two Income-Trap & The Fragile Middle Class) You are entitled to more information before you make such gross generalizations... your experience may be valid in coming these conclusions, but to be effective you better know what the most talented in that field think before spewing nonsensical personal beliefs
Refuting Point 5 - Living in a right-center country, how does one criticize the problems he or she sees? Most people tend to point in an opposite direction and yell its them; their fault. I do this all time. However, left-right debates miss the point. I know very few people are able to argue at others successfully. Like this post, the opportunity to make a serious connection with you was lost when I started listing all the ways in which you are wrong and I am right. I conceed that loss in hopes that others who read this will take some time to look at this diaglogue in context and judge for themselves.. I have been in brokerage world and the academic one and your characterizations do not fit; they are overly simplistic and reaffirm only your precious world view... I imagine mine do as well but I sit here typing towards a dialogue with you not away from one
Refuting Point 6 - Evidence is a word used to disguise power. Those who are in power decide what evidence is... See the funding for hubble telescope during the bush years (how it dropped off to appease the religious rights' claim that universe was not Carl Sagan old.... Billions and billions of years old)... I do not want to go into evidence. But I will point out that the longest economic expansion in this country lasted nearly 40 years called the golden era 1937-1973 was a lead in part to a balance between state and private power....
Look forward to all responses
It's getting late, sorry I didn't get back to you sooner.
There is so much to say, but I don't have the time, so I'll just bring up a few things for you to consider.
On one hand, you rightly point to the "golden age" of America, where things just worked better; a time of much smaller government with much lower pay than today, less business regulation than today, less intrusion into our lives than today, less of a whole lot of things than today...
On the other hand you seem to defend academia...
Hmmm... I see a big disconnect there, considering academia declared war on that "golden age" way back in the 50's, and that war continues to this day.
First it was academia's acceptance of Critical Theory back in the 50's, then it was the hipster pseudo-Marxist's smug mockery during the 60's and 70's, followed by the deconstruction of all of the golden age's history and meanings in the 80's, concluding with the post-modernization-into-irrelevance of every one of the values and standards of the golden age during the 90's and aughts.
You recognize the success of that time, a time that was examined and found worthless by the exalted in the institution of your livelihood? Hmmm...
In many ways we'd be better off adopting the social/economic/political structures of the that golden age, but those structures do not include the original topic Leo brought up -- and extensive, generous welfare state and it's revival. That welfare state is more a product of that golden age's end-time, a coda to a great symphony, not the main recurring theme found throughout the era.
3 chord sloth,
First, I really appreciated your response since it gave me a couple pieces to reconsider. Second, it also provides me an opportunity to clarify some mythology. I think it is important to challenge the distinction between smaller government and less regulation. The last 30 years have seen an exaggerated period of de-regulation (opening up markets alll over the world)... This is in direct conflict with your earlier statement suggesting that we have gotten better at making more rules... I would argue that we haven't. In fact, I would argue that the rules, as you so rightly point out to Leo, have been captured by two flavors of oligarchs. However, as Galbraith suggests: complexity is a disguise for deception (making seem that rules exist in totality when in fact they are being systematically gutted)... So, it is not that there were less rules back then, but that the rules held; and that we weren't being sold the idea of complex regulation throught the front door as the true essence of regulation was systematically eviscerated at the back door.
Another myth I would like to dispel is the idea that I am stakeholder in academia. Being familiar with the process, teaching and writing do not make me an insider. In fact, quite the contrary, I am one of the first to criticize the disparity between todays' corporate university (Giroux, 2005) and the lived experiences of ordinary working people. In the grand scheme of publishing, grant-writing (fund-raising) and promoting university prestige, I enjoy being an obstinent challenger of the role played by academics...
Lastly, it is important to do more than name a few theories as a means of demonstrating your knowledge to gain advocacy with me. Critical theory is impossible to characterize in one sentence and many of the great critical theorists were not 1950's academics. In fact, Paolo Freire (1973) Pedagogies of the Oppressed is a world renowned best seller. Edward Said's Orientalism discusses how a dominant culture appears to be malevolent while shaping "the Other" as different or less than... bell hooks (1984) writes about the intersections of race, gender and class... Edward Galeano reminds us of our colonizing past in Latin America : one the best lines I have ever heard --- about Chile ("People were imprisoned so that prices could be set free." Peter McLaren and Joe Kinchloe discuss the privatization of education. And of course there are seminal thinkers that you may be referring to like Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Noam Chomsky..
My livelihood is not about an institution nor is it worthless. It is about identifying correctly, intimately, and reflexively those economic processes so as to resist those neoliberal strategies from co-opting my life's narrative before I pass from this mortal coil. It is important here not confuse me with someone who romanticizes a long forgotten time as a means of replicating in this context: Instead, I take the position that golden era of economics exists because it was sensitive to cultural, political and economic problems of the time and addressed them. This period of time and context are important models of how to make tough decisions, repair what had been broken and provide some notice, direction and energy for all of those nation-state people who missed out on the narrative. However, in a global capitalistic world, the importance of the domestic falls under the weight of free-market global GDP figures... In essence, outsiders hold the fate of Americans in many ways (market share of US companies, trade policies, access to natural resources and relationships among other G20 countries) Let's not forget here who owns our debt... Anyway, there are millions of americans (not ranting) but legitimately upset by business pratices of a few people... whether it is Abu Ghraib, Sub-Prime Lending, 2/5th's of Person, massacres in vietnam, chile, afghanistan, palestine (See William Blum's Killing Hope) and others... we need to repair our relationships with the world, mother earth and our own communities...
It is through a process of repair where mistakes are forgiven...
three chord sloth,
I do not put the blame on Reagan or any one admisnistration. They're all patsies of the financial oligarchs. Let's keep in mind that it was under Clinton's administration that OTC derivatives mushroomed because they refused to listen to Brooksley Born and regulate them. Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers all wanted to feed their masters. They got what they wanted.
The Pension Ponzi I speak of has been going on for a long time but took off in the mid-90s and exploded after the tech bubble burst. Trillions of dollars of pension contributions going to fund hedge funds, real estate funds, private equity funds, infrastructure funds and commodity funds. Everyone wants a piece of the pension pie, including consultants, all milking the pension cash cow to death.
As for Big Government, we have to realize that it's effectively an extension of Big Business. Just look at the BP fiasco to see who is the boss (hint, it isn't President Obama and his administration).
You can cut off all pensions tomorrow, but all you're going to do is increase the future cost of social care. There are no simple solutions to this crisis.
(Sorry I am so late getting back to you... I can only surf on my time, I'm too busy during the work day to respond.)
OK... now you're starting to make sense. The masters-of-the-universe certainly over-promised investment returns when selling themselves to our governments. You'll get no argument from me on that. But of course, that doesn't excuse our politicians turning around and offering earlier retirements, lifetime cheap medical coverage, and defined benefit pension pay over and above anything seen by the common man to their favored and most loyal voting block -- i.e. their own minions.
One thing about those oligarchs -- there are two distinct groups, and sometime back in the late 80's or early 90's they realized that if they joined forces instead of fighting against each other, they could seize control without the general population even noticing. The financial/big business branch you seem to have no trouble identifying, it's the "political class" oligarchs you seem to miss. They are the elite academics, activists, media "opinion-shapers", politically connected union chiefs, and CFR-types... and they make up a second power structure every bit as imperious and power-hungry as their financial/business doppelgangers.
Take a look at the deindustrialization and subsequent stagnation of the lower and lower-middle classes of the West, for example. That couldn't have occurred over the past 2 -3 decades without the willing participation of both houses. Some wanted cheap labor arbitrage, others wanted to elevate the poor overseas. Still others wanted environmental purity at home, while others simply wanted to undercut American hegemony. Each had their own agenda, and the one thing they had in common was they didn't want to be in second place behind an uber-powerful middle class any longer.
The way I see it, both of the "ends" joined forces and declared war against the middle. Both believe in rule by elites, neither particularly like meritocracy and prefer the credentialism (exclusionism) we see today, and both have their ideologically blind cheering section amongst us, the wretched masses.
One thing is for sure: if we are to continue with the globalized, (near) zero tariff free trade regime we currently "enjoy" then the government/business partnership will only grow. We are forced into mercantilism because we are competing against predatory mercantilist states. If we want our middle class back we'll have to rethink our worldwide trade assumptions.