At WaPo, Fareed Zakaria writes that Barack Obama’s first task is to save capitalism. After writing the requisite paragraph explaining that Obama’s supporters love him only because he is charismatic, Zakaria explains to us that being POTUS is real work.
Wow, Fareed, what would we do if we didn’t have you to clarify stuff for us? (/snark)
The task is to restore confidence in credit. But how is confidence restored? “After all, George W. Bush has pretty consistently projected an air of confidence, one that tends to get people even more worried than they need to be.” Yes, and that’s because he has no clue what he’s doing, and everyone in the country knows that but him.
The system has to be stabilized and reformed. And I would say there is one more task, which is to sweep up all the “free market” worship we can find and drown it in a bathtub.
At The Guardian, Gary Younge gets to the heart of the problem.
Greenspan’s ideology was unfettered, free-market capitalism. Its understanding of how the world works was rooted in self-interest. It was a value system that placed the private before the public, the individual before the collective, and the wealth of the few before the welfare of the many.
So pervasive was this worldview that, after a while, it was not even understood to be a view at all. It was just the hard-nosed reality against which only lunatics and leftists raged. “Unlike many economists,” Bob Woodward wrote of Alan Greenspan in his book Maestro (the title speaks volumes), “he has never been rule driven or theory driven. The data drive.” They drove a sleek black limousine over the edge of a steep cliff. And since the invisible hand of the market ostensibly guided everything, there was no one who could really be held accountable or responsible for anything. The buck didn’t stop anywhere. Indeed, for those who were already wealthy, the bucks just kept rolling in.
If you want to see brainwashed cult followers, don’t look at Obama supporters. Look at libertarians, “free market” devotees, and anyone who thinks Ayn Rand had a brilliant intellect. Somehow our economy came to be guided by these nitwits and their transparently absurd belief system. I say “transparently” absurd because it has always been utterly disconnected from real-world human behavior, and those of us living in the real world could see that. But the leaders of the “free markets” cult were insulated enough from reality that they didn’t see it.
One of the most galling aspect of the “free market” religion has been the notion that the wealth generated by an economy belongs only and entirely to those investing capital into it. Workers whose labor creates the wealth have no claim to that wealth. Worse, the status of working people has eroded to the point that workers are looked at as parasites because they have some expectation of a living wage, health care, and some kind of retirement benefits. “Smart” capitalists scraped these parasites out of their companies as quickly as possible by moving to Third World countries where labor can be exploited. And according to the free market culties, any attempt by government to protect wages and benefits or to make sure securities and finance are kept honest is “socialism.”
The problem with this system is that, if a majority of people have no disposable income, who’s going to buy stuff? And what happens to capitalism when money just plain stops flowing? Well, we can see what happens, because that’s pretty much what has happened — money has stopped flowing.
The theory has been that people who rise to the tops of corporations have done so because they are smart and capable, and these smart and capable people naturally will not do anything to hurt the long-term prospects of their businesses, like selling fraudulent products or stealing from shareholders. Therefore, government regulation is an unnecessary burden.
The problem with this theory is that, too often, people rise to the tops of corporations because they are aggressive and ruthless and don’t have the scruples that God gave pickles.
Right-wingers won’t be able to wrap their heads around the idea that saving capitalism requires putting limits on it, but the truth is that capitalism, left entirely unfettered, sooner or later devours itself. That’s what we see happening right now.
We not only need to re-learn the lesson that capitalism needs regulation; we also need to restore the value of work. Citizens who work for paychecks to make a living are not “parasites,” and they are not “cost.” They are America. Capitalists need to remember that. We have an economy for the people, not people for an economy.