When Charles Peters wrote his neoliberal manifesto in 1982, it wasn’t easy to see where the Reagan Revolution was leading the country. When I look back on the manifesto with the benefit of hindsight, what strikes me more than anything else is that it suffered from a mostly praiseworthy idealism that was mismatched to the threat.
It was premised consistently on the idea that things could be otherwise and that the Democratic Party could challenge their organized supporters with impunity. Better ideas would prevail by virtue of being better ideas. Unions, whether industrial, private sector or educational, could take well-deserved hits without any political cost to the left and we’d get better outcomes as a result. The federal workforce could actually improve if the Democrats took them on a little bit rather than always having their back. Not enough weight was given to the possibility that the left was under assault and that the status quo was far better than what was about to come. It was a bad time to be weakening and dividing forces, and a particularly bad time for arguing that the merits of ideas would prevail over the blunt force conservative army arrayed against us.
But the things Peters had in mind were much more nuanced than how neoliberalism is portrayed today. Take this, for example:
If, for example, you see only a narrow range of choices, if you are a prisoner of conventional, respectable thinking, you are unlikely to find new ways out of our problems. That’s why some neo-liberals, who are on the whole internationalists and free-traders, are willing to consider such bizarre ideas as getting out of NATO, forgetting about the Persian Gulf, embargoing Japanese cars, or requiring that, in part at least, they be built here.
You can’t take that sampling of ideas and cram it into neat categories. And this is because what Peters was describing wasn’t some coherent ideology but more a faith that reason could play more of a role in creating good policy. He also saw a society that, to his mind, had become selfish and splintered, which is why he sought out things that could unite us. He called for a restoration of the draft because he recognized how it had leveled American society in the mid-century and that the new system was leading to a situation where the higher classes did not provide public service. He called on intellectualized liberals to be less snobbish and condescending to the “Huck Finns” in middle America who often demonstrated a superior common sense. Overall, he was pretty consistent in aspiring for a society with less stratification and more fairness.
Obviously, he favored free trade and internationalism, but not to the point that he wouldn’t consider protecting the domestic auto industry from Japanese competition. Long before we went to war in the Persian Gulf, he was looking for a way to forget about it completely. His internationalism didn’t preclude ripping up NATO.
What he wasn’t doing was launching some broad defense of laissez-faire capitalism or calling for privatizing everything under the Sun. In some respects, he was trying to identify areas where liberalism had become politically unpopular and find rationales for making changes. But, truly, his idea was less about winning than about doing things in a better way. To me, the most glaring flaw was that the piece was almost apolitical. It didn’t recognize that you get left-leaning outcomes by beating the right, not by reasoning with them.
Again, though, this was 1982 and it would take a while to see what conservatives would do with power once they grasped it. To have correctly predicted back then where we are today would have required absurdly pessimistic forecasting. It was too tempting to think in idealistic terms, as if there were no risks to what he was advocating. It looked like it would be possible to live without the things about the left that are annoying without it empowering the right.
As a provocative essay, it still reads well. But it looks misguided in retrospect. What it doesn’t look like is how it is often characterized today. It doesn’t even really look like a precursor to the Democratic Leadership Council or the presidency of Bill Clinton, unless you squint a lot and ignore all the contrary evidence.
Peters has been retired for the entire time I’ve been writing for the Washington Monthly but his influence is still a guiding star. Yet, I’ve never heard the word neoliberal uttered in a staff meeting. I will sometimes be treated to robust defenses of Clinton’s presidency, but even here it is couched in a recognition that times have changed rather dramatically. What made sense and brought victories in the 1990’s would not necessarily make sense or bring victories today.
In other words, today’s Monthly doesn’t carry any water for either the neoliberalism that Peters discussed in his essay or for the characterizations of neoliberalism that are thrown around today. What’s consistent is a desire to explore policy first on its own merits and only secondarily on its political advantages or prospects.
One thing I agree with Jonathan Chait about is that the term ‘neoliberalism’ is thrown around as an epithet by a lot of people who really don’t know what they’re talking about. If you talk to ten people, you’ll probably get ten different explanations for what they mean when they use the word. It could fill in for Clinton/Blair Third Wayism in a better or less-defined manner. It could refer to Naomi Klein-style disaster capitalism. It could be an attempt to define support for free trade and international economic agreements. It could be primarily about the preference for public-private partnerships or the privatization of government functions. In some cases, it might be as unsophisticated as Chait describes it, as little more than an anti-capitalist word used by hardcore socialists.
Whatever any individual has in their own mind, they use the word as an insult.
I understand why Chait chose to fight back by retelling the history of the Democratic Party, but I think this was probably not the way to go. Yes, many people have an idealized and sanitized view of the party during the eras of the New Deal and the Great Society, but what’s going on today is about today’s politics and today’s economy. Just as what Peters meant in his 1982 essay is of limited importance today, so, too is the relative economic conservatism of the party during the Kennedy administration.
Today’s economy isn’t working for people the way the economy of the 1990’s did. People don’t have to condemn or approve of the political leadership of the party in the 1990’s to demand new solutions today. The inverse of Chait’s complaint that neoliberalism is little more than an insult intended to cut off debate is that complaining about the term’s lack of clarity is also a way to cut off debate.
The problem is that, all around, this just isn’t that intelligent of a conversation. Our situation currently resembles something closer to the 1890’s or 1920’s than anything from the Progressive Era or the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The left is in the wilderness, the economy is monopolized and income inequality is off the charts, but everything is ripening for a comeback. Studying how the left prepared for the Progressive Era and the New Deal would be a better use of time than perpetually rehashing the 1980’s or 1990’s.
If the center left in this country is just a stand-in for defending the 1990s and proposing more of that, then they deserve the criticism they’re getting from the left. I don’t think that’s actually the situation we’re in, but Chait seems to almost accept the battle on those terms.
I think that’s a mistake.
As for the left, one thing that Chait hinted at but never really came out and said is that the Democratic Party (as a party of the left) will of course always be more of a worker’s party than an employer’s party. But, when a Democrat wins the presidency, they have to be more balanced. This has, in fact, always happened in our system, including with liberal lions like FDR, Kennedy, LBJ and even Obama. It’s be nice if more people didn’t see this as a system error. It’s actually a feature of a two-party system where whoever wins has to govern for everyone. In a real way, a workers’ president wouldn’t even make sense, and it would be a failure if it was attempted.
When Democrats have successfully governed this country, they’ve done so by doing right by small farmers, small businessmen, and entrepreneurs, all of whom are employers first and only workers second. This is one thing Charles Peters was definitely correct about in his essay and something the Democrats should focus more on today as we try to figure out a way to restore small business vitality to small town America in an era of crippling economic consolidation.
“If the center left in this country is just a stand-in for defending the 1990s and proposing more of that, then they deserve the criticism they’re getting from the left.”
What if the center left in this country is just a stand-in for defending the 2010s and proposing more of that?
Is that all you’ve got?
Not in the least! I just thought it was an interesting question that might spark an informative conversation, which is y’know, the reason I come here.
I agree that the center left “defending the 1990s and proposing more of it” isn’t the situation we’re in. To my mind, the current cleavage between the “center left” and the “left” in this country is more about the Obama years than the Clinton years.
Seems to me–maybe I’m wrong–that our situation is the center left defending the Obama years and working as hard as hell to achieve more of that. While the left works hard as hell to criticize them for it.
If I’m right, isn’t that a topic worth considering? If I’m right, how do we get to a place where we study how left prepared for the Progressive Era and the New Deal instead of perpetually rehashing the 2010s?
Am I right?
Well, yes, there’s a strain of thought that can’t distinguish between Clinton and Obama. We need not take them seriously, however.
If not taking Wrongheaded People seriously was an effective political strategy, we’d be living in a utopia. And if fighting the previous war mattered, we’d never lose.
It’s not necessarily a split between Clinton and Obama. The problematic “lefties” usually, although not always, throw Obama in with Hillary. Roughly, they’re the people who say we may as well get rid of Obamacare because that’s how we’ll get socialized health care. They also implicitly say we need to get rid of Obama’s environmental regulations to stop fracking (they opposed Hillary on that) and we need to not have a $10 minimum wage so we can have a $15 minimum. Et cetera, et cetera.
I wish we could ignore them but we can’t. They don’t get a lot of space in “serious” publication but they are important on the internet. Many of them are dishonest, as indicated about how they’ve fallen silent on the evils of Obamacare now that we’re facing a real possibility of 25 million losing coverage and tens of thousands of deaths per year. Presumably they’re spouting this silliness for clicks or rubles.
It was naive. I was on staff of one of the people quoted in that article. I drank the Kool-aid.
We failed to understand that the shared prosperity of the post-war era was the product of hard won victories. We underestimated the importance of unions, and did not listen when they made objections. We talked about mean testing entitlements (the longer Peters essay does precisely that)
Neo-liberals created endlessly complicated solutions in the name of public-private partnership. Solutions so complicated they were almost impossible to explain.
In retrospect we helped enable the conservative agenda. I can argue up and down that this was not our intent.
But it is the simple truth.
Your pitch may play well to the Silicon Valley crowd, but is is now ludicrous.
Peters was dead wrong about being the party of employers. Of being disinterested in the struggle of labor and capital. You are dead wrong about not wanting to be the party of employees.
Frankly, given the fact that it has been 40 years since anyone in the bottom half of the class has gotten a raise, it is asinine.
See there was this President named FDR…
“Then Democrats have successfully governed this country, they’ve done so by doing right by small farmers, small businessmen, and entrepreneurs, all of whom are employers first and only workers second. This is one thing Charles Peters was definitely correct about in his essay and something the Democrats should focus more on today as we try to figure out a way to restore small business vitality to small town America in an era of crippling economic consolidation.”
You don’t understand the time you live in.
Sometime years ago I had a good discussion with Robert Kuttner. He said a modern socialist had an advantage in that they saw capitalism as system with POLITICAL was well economic features. The wonks might be well intentioned, but they were, he suggested, largely blind to the political consequences.
Free trade might be a good idea, but if the result is to make unions less politically powerful, you alter the balance of power between labor and capital. Of course many of the neo-liberals found thinking of it in these terms repellant – an expression of old thinking that is no longer.
I disagreed with him at the time. He was dead right.
That’s the same fucking argument I’ve made for years and that I just made in this piece.
I am reasonably sure you don’t understand the argument.
Kuttner is a Democratic Socialist. His core argument is that YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE BETWEEN EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYEES. You have to pick a side. There is no way to avoid it.
That is not the argument you made: in fact you made precisely the opposite argument in the last paragraphs of your piece.
It is one of the core arguments between neo-liberals and the left. Neo-liberals are uncomfortable with talking about class.
I was and am REALLY uncomfortable with a class based politics. It is why I am not a socialist. I don’t believe in nationalizing the commanding heights.
But after 40 years of the rich getting richer and everyone else getting nothing its not a subject that can be avoided anymore. And the challenge from the left on this topic is a serious one.
That’s why framing it as income/wealth inequality is far superior. It’s more defined. Class is much too broad a term and loaded with superior/inferior status, much of it based on ‘luck’ as opposed to authentically and legitimately earned.
The problem is that you try to shove people in little boxes.
When I agree with you that the neoliberals (the ones we’re talking about in this instance, at least, meaning actual Democrats) made a blunder when they decided to start an internal scrap while Reagan’s hordes were already on the battlefield, that is dismissed because of what I don’t agree with you about.
The Democratic Party, at its soaring heights, was not just a workers’ party or a labor party. It was the consensus governing party of the nation, almost as popular on Madison Avenue as it was in the coal fields of Kentucky and the assembly lines of Detroit. It was a fierce defender of farmers and small businessman and fought ruthlessly against regional inequality and the monopolization of the economy. It did this first and foremost to protect people’s ability to go into business and compete, not to help consumers get the most convenience of the lowest prices.
The worst thing to happen to America is that we stopped thinking of our people as producers and started thinking of them only as consumers. They can get a good deal on patio furniture but they can’t make or sell it.
We do not need to choose between labor and management. We need to realize that we’ve killed the American Dream and that we won’t get back political power by ameliorating the damage.
What is neo-liberalism anyway?
Delong, undersecretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration defines it as follows:
This, I would argue, defines much of the non-socialist left of center.
It is intellectually bankrupt to argue, as Booman does here, that we should stop arguing over it, since it to this day informs much of the policy thinking from DC based think tanks.
If I post on this topic, it is because I once fervently believed in the idea.
So in fairness, here is Paters himself as described in the New York Times:
If you read Peters as I did in the 80’s you became familiar with his attacks on “interest group” liberalism.
Delong, who still calls himself a neo-liberal, wrote
As someone who was active at the time, and who knew some of the players (Nicki Tsongas was in my law school writing group, and I worked for Hart) , one thing neo-liberals had in common was a deep admiration for the lines in JFK’s speeches about the public interest. They were idealists after all. Hart ran Indiana for Bobby Kennedy. Tsongas worked in the Peace Corps.
These were not Goldman Sachs guys in their youth. But Delong is right: they were blind. They looked at unions as corrupt and reactionary.
I believe that Gary Hart would have been, in office, very different from Bill Clinton. On foreign policy he was never a DLC guy. Gary Hart was never for welfare reform, and I struggle to this day to argue he stood for different things than Clinton did in his second term.
But one cannot look back over the last 30 years and say the neo-liberals were right about much. They attacked institutions which they saw as selfish, but which in fact were completely necessary. They saw the world in moral terms, but were blind to the practical consequences of the policies they enacted. In the aftermath of the Fall of Communism they became blind to need for institutions built to restrain financial institutions, with disastrous consequences for all.
So I understand why Booman wants to change the subject.
The problem for Booman, and for the DC think tanks, and for the Blairites, is that people like Sanders have been right far more often then they have.
This is obvious to the young: and the result is seen in France and in the UK and in the US primaries. The young see the economic system as rigged, and politics as rigged. They do not believe that is a simple matter of just restoring some hypothetical balance that never existed to begin with.
Booman wants to change the subject from neoliberalism.
With good reason. The ideas that associated with neoliberalism have failed both economically and politically.
Where are you getting the idea that I’m a Blairite, Clintonite, neoliberal, or whatever? Comparing me to DeLong or Chait or whomever, when I have no record of agreeing with them on these disputes?
I could speculate on where you get this shit, but what would be the point? It’s meritless.
I opposed Hillary in 2008 because I did not want the DLC to come back from the dead. I told you repeatedly before he was a presidential candidate, that I agreed with Sanders more than any other member of the Senate. I voted for Sanders specifically to try to win him an extra delegate at the convention.
I think the neoliberal debate is like a bunch of political third graders trying to do trigonometry. They think they sound smart and have things figured out, but they don’t even know what the terms mean.
But just because I think the debate is stupid doesn’t mean that I somehow am defending Clintonism or (especially) think it is appropriate for today.
You want to know where I stand? I’m much more in the Warren camp because unlike Bernie she has moved on from looking at everything from the consumers’ point of view and is seeing things from the small businessperson’s point of view. Corporate consolidation is a much bigger problem than consumer financial protection, as great as Warren’s achievement in that area has been.
Warren gets the politics and the policy, and Sanders just doesn’t much get either. He’s done a lot of good, but he doesn’t have a clue where to go from here. It’s good that he motivates people, but he can’t really lead them.
I’m not sure Warren can either, but she know where the path is.
Well at least I offered a definition of what it was – which you did not.
Honestly I don’t think you understand what it is – and since you don’t you don’t understand it you don’t understand why it is relevant.
The argument between neo-liberalism on one hand (anti-trust sits squarely in that tradition) and the socialists on the other is the defining argument on the left of center throughout the world.
Arguing that it is irrelevant in light of Macron, Corbyn and the broader discussion is frankly ignorant.
I don’t take what you write about Sanders seriously – I am not sure why any Sanders person who was here in the primaries would.
Not getting why anyone is putting the 2017 election results in France and the UK in the same sentence. Just enough French voters fell for the slick packaging of another (and possibly more extreme) neoliberal. Hollande was obviously too weak to the get the job done; although he worked hard to do so and that’s at the core of why he was rejected for a reelection.
Macron = center right (France’s version of Blair and Clinton-Obama)
Corbyn = left
Which is why when one of The Usual Suspects here, aka a card carry member of the Our Progressive Betters Club, opines on anything, I quickly move onto the next post.
Why all y’all continue to stay here and inflict your brand of purity politics on the rest of us is a mystery. Surely there are other forums where like-minded folks like yourselves can gather and talk about how the Dems are all untrustworthy neoliberals beholden to nothing but corporate interests, yada, yada, yada. Like the Greens, you can always be counted on to do what’s best, electorally speaking, for the GOP.
I suspect I’m not reading this in the right context, because it always seemed to me that rolling back the New Deal would bring back the same problems the country faced before FDR. I never thought it would lead to a Trump-like figure, but otherwise I was sure that disaster was inevitable.
I sat in rooms in the 80’s and heard people predict EXACTLY what has happened.
Labor union economists is one group comes to mind.
There was another.
His name is Bernie Sanders.
Scott Lemieux over at LGM responded to Chait’s article with some good observations. Particularly:
and
Carter had two accomplishments neoliberals loved: deregulation of the trucking and airline industry.
Microbrewing, too…
You ran out of material long ago.
Im curious what your opinion is of Officers of the Court that spent their time rummaging through stolen property.
As far as Davis,
old curtain rods
.
that was Nader.
Apologies, here’s the link.
The evolution of the term has made it susceptible to being used for misleading invective. The original meaning, dating to the 30’s, was a belief that free-market capitalism led to economic and social disasters, while centralized planning led to a different set of disasters, and the solution is that markets need to be carefully regulated and managed. You could call it “reformed classical liberalism”. This is a real “duh” based on what’s been happening in the past century or so. It’s basically equivalent to “reality-based”.
A more recent meaning was developed in the 80’s, referring to the idea that society should be run with free-market capitalism using classical liberal principles after all, and the lessons of the 30’s were mistaken. This is deregulation, Reagan and Thatcher, etc. You could call this “revanchist classical liberalism”. It’s almost completely at odds with the first definition. As we’ve seen, the advocates were wrong and the same policies have produced the same mess they did a century ago.
To say “everybody is a neoliberal” requires conflating these two definitions. Current democrats are “neoliberal” by the first definition but not the second; current Republicans are by the second definition but not the first. It’s a doozy of a conflation because the two philosophies are bitter enemies. Calling Democrats “neoliberal” by the first definition isn’t an insult at all, because it’s just sensible policy. Calling them “neoliberal” by the second would be laughable if it hadn’t caused such trouble. The conflation, unfortunately, allows writers to attack the current Democrats for supporting policies they bitterly oppose.
If I didn’t know better I’d say the entire confusing mess had been cooked up by rightists to help create splits on the left – and I’m not entirely sure I do know better.
Curt, Democrats of the first definition were called “liberal”, not “neoliberal.”
As you say, “It’s almost completely at odds with the first definition.”
That’s because it has nothing to do with the first definition. The “liberalism” of “Neoliberalism” is 19th-century Liberalism, which is an economic philosophy.
This was “neo’d” in the later 20th century by Friedrich von Hayek, and even more so, by Milton Friedman, and was pushed as a political agenda by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
What’s confusing is that many who are Neoliberals don’t call themselves that, whereas they may in fact be (social) liberals, better known as “progressives”.
If you want to see serious neoliberalism in action today, together with “progressive” policies, I suggest you look at the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio in NY, a “progressive” totally owned by big real estate. Or in another form, look at his arch-rival Andrew Cuomo.
The thing about Hillary Clinton is that she held elected office only eight years and didn’t do much. If you want to see real neoliberalism in action, look at De Blasio or Cuomo. Thousands of others too, I suppose, it’s just that I suffer from these two at close hand.
No, neoliberalism was originally coined in the 30’s to describe people who’d given up on classic liberalism (now “libertarian” in the US although still “liberal” in Europe) after the catastrophe of the Great Depression. It’s only in the 80’s that it also came to refer to those who just wanted those old-timey classic liberalism policies.
You could make a case for Cuomo being a 80’s sense “neoliberal”. But de Blasio? Don’t be absurd. Since when would Friedman and Thatcher have supported millionaire taxes and rent freezes?
You obviously don’t live in New York City.
Did the left “prepare” for the Progressive Era? Did the left prepare for the New Deal? The Southern half of the Democratic Party did not except to the extent they periodically had “good roads” governors or “good schools” governors. And both of them were the result of grassroots (or rolled-out sod) local campaigns that were driven from national organization to local organizations. I’m not sure that that model in as workable in the current circumstances, given the suspicion that now surrounds non-profit organizations and their agendas.
Is that true, or does that have to be earned? I don’t see a workers party of any vision and vocality these days–at least one that can speak to all of the many different issues of the current work force and not just the stereotypes from their ideological labor formation or their union experience. the difficulty today is that one has to have a full-time job of the type that unions institutionalized in the early 20th century through World War II to have the same kind of issues; today’s work force has many more issues.
I’ve not seen the fact that whoever wins must govern for everyone honored in the past quarter century. And that was exclusively by the party that is not the Democrats–in power or out of power. And Democratic Presidents who tried to govern on behalf of everyone were taken as chumps. Is this a hard necessity or just a political courtesy when there is normal order and reciprocity?
You might think that small farmers, small businessmen, and entrepreneurs are employers first and only workers second. In oligopolistic and oligopsonistic markets, employers are treated more like middle managers and pressed for patronage gifts and special ways of working their workers. Most small operators cave to this pressure and often become more oppressive of their workers as a result; others are able to select the cutsomers they don’t want to work with or the vendors they don’t want buy from. Oligopoly/oligopsony reduces their choices and freedom dramatically. Big/small is an issue as is bad behavior.
Restoring small business vitality requires two immedidate policy actions: increasing aggregate demand in the economy and have progressive corporate taxation that taxes big concentrations more than small business. That did work well during the 1950s. A whole lot of the billionaire companies got their starts then as local stores, but did not begin concentrating until the tax changes that brough the “high-flying 1960s”, congloomerates, mutual funds, and then private equity capital deals. In the environment of the 1950s and even 1960s, all the complexity wasn’t worth the returns it would get. It was better to do your knitting well competitively than to get sharp with lawyers, accountants, and tax experts.
What exactly is a “worker’s president” in the sense you describe it here just to knock it down. If you mean a president, regardless or origin, who would pander to “what organized labor wants” instead of serving the interests of working people, I might grant your point if you cans say how those “interests of working people” get known to the president. If you are excluding a shop floor/nurses station/truck cab-to-presidency transitions through election, we have definitely had worse come through the executive suites of politicians parked for later use. And now through a self-appointed nominee.
That task of increasing demand in our economy will not be easy given the current compensation structure. People simply don’t have the money to spare. Simple as that. And it is not terribly likely they will borrow money to spend. So the economy keeps running along at under 2% growth year over year. We are not alone with this problem. Japan has had the disease longer than us. To date no one seems to have the formula. Increasing productivity goes to the elites, they suck it up like a giant squid.
One of the root causes is income inequality. More money means more spending. How do we do it? Infrastructure and increased min wage will surely help. And believe it or not real universal health care could free up tens of thousands for more productive work and end medical financial,hardship. More money for consumption. So failing that and the elites who control this shit, we run along the bottom.
One could come to believe that neoliberalism is nonsense. No need to argue about it. It failed, and there is no manisfesto can revive it. Take what you like from it and move on. Maybe, just maybe we need a bigger government to help work us out of stagnation.
Neoliberalism IS nonsense. The problem is that it benefits the Masters of the Universe, so we haven’t succeeded in getting rid of it. The result is things like Brexit and Trump, and that is just the beginning if the powers that be don’t wise up.
Yes, it sets the stage for implicit bipartisan agreement except it is agreement among the elites.
Politicians created that compensation structure through wage and hour laws and through tax policy. They can change it. They also created it through the fiscal policies of the federal budget, and they can change that as well. The fed has set the economy into a low-growth pattern to “prevent inflation”.
The root cause of inadequate demand is income inequality that underpays people in order to have massive amounts of cash sitting on the table.
Yes, on health care’s effect in increasing effective aggregate demand.
It would be helpful if for a time people stopped with pursuing -isms. The GOP created the idoelogical breakdown of parties in the 1964 election and then purged all non-conservatives from the Republican Party. The Democrats tried to do the same with the purported leftists of the Vietnam War era. The ideological rigidity of American politics is what has ended American peace and prosperity.
The GOP nobody-but and the Democrats nobody-of rigidities are slightly different but equally devastating to public policy as implemented and experienced.
I would only comment that the Fed has been trying to cause some inflation but has not been successful. Low interest rates are accommodative, but it hasn’t triggered investment spending due to inadequate demand. They have recently started to increase rates. Who knows what comes next with Trump policies.
There has been a lot of asset inflation (especially securities) as a result of the Fed’s activities. To the point that analysts are wondering when the correction will come. Putting money in assets does not drive commodity inflation, just shifting money among paper assets until it is captured as cash.
You’re talking about a bubble as opposed to inflation. Some would think it is simply higher valuation for making lots,of money etc. But some do say it will all soon crash. Personally I think it is flying high in anticipation of tax cuts. But the first round seems to have failed. On to round two. And that could easily drive valuations higher if they get corporate tax cuts.
PS too bad none of that helps 90% of the people or more.
Why are small businesed better than big business, if you can unionize big businesses collectively.
The Germans, through co-determination, make big companies work for workers quite well.
I really don’t get the appeal. Small companies mean small margins, bad pay and even worse benefits.
It really seems like nostalgia.
you’re really aiming for no votes from anyone who actually has responsibility for anything aside from their own household.
America! A country where no one need go into business for themselves!
“need” or “can”?
fladem wants to revise the American Dream so that it doesn’t involve going into business for yourself.
Amazing!
Isn’t part of that drive to go into business for oneself that is peddled as the American Dream something like “don’t be the slave when you can be the slaveowner?” Not to put too crass a point on the American Dream peddled by Robert J. Ringer and others who appeared in the van of the Reagan Revolution.
fladem just makes the obvious point that for labor to coalesce around an employer, there must be enough worth bargaining over.
SEIU would be the likely organizer of mom-and-pop establishments, but they are preoccupied with the large chains.
Workers in the mom-and-pop establishments are helped by generalized labor standards laws that fall equally on their competitors whereas union contracts might advantage their competitors.
What sort of economic relationships should be part of the American Dream (normative social expectation) has always been problematic. We are for the moment stuck with notions from 18th century forms of capitalism as played out before there were protections for corporations.
What exactly does being a “workers party” mean?
Some of the 19th century workers party ideas went toward workers institutions (workers schools or hospitals, for example) or to old town guild ideas.
And in that world there were two classes: workers and those who controlled workers lives. There are now those who help those who control workers lives but are themselves also workers. The “themselves also workers” doesn’t really register strongly until there is a general layoff.
The difficult situation of lots of workers is that they work for multiple employers on conflicting schedules and wind up shifting jobs frequently to accommodate several less-that-full-time schedules. What is the American Dream there?
Not to go all Nietzschean on you, but that’s actually a slave mentality.
People come from all over the world to America because they can still successfully open a corner store, buy and run a motel, take a good idea and start up a novel new business. It’s the engine of our economy and it still provides most of the jobs in this country.
To equate this with not wanting to be a slave is cynical beyond belief. Wanting to spend your life making something, employing people, being responsible, being a leader in your community, these are not suspicious aspirations.
You want to know why the left fails? Because it constantly sends a message that it doesn’t value the things that so many people cherish about this country. But it didn’t used to be this way. We didn’t used to act like a narrow party for bitter proletarians. We were a party for everyone but the asshole monopolists who wanted to destroy our ability and freedom to compete.
It is indeed a slave mentality, but it is what is peddled in all or the get successful books. It is what a lot of people say about their desire to go into business.
After all what does “Be your own boss?” mean? The distinction between free labor and slave labor narrows as compensation narrows and “free” becomes as in “beer” instead of as in “country”.
Yes, people come from all over the world to American because they can still successfully open a corner store, open a restaurant, start a trades company (painting, carpentry, plumbing, etc.). That is no longer an approved part of the American Dream under Trump.
So this is your Worker’s party?
“We were a party for everyone but the asshole monopolists who wanted to destroy our ability and freedom to compete.”
People who want to run a restaurant or a convenience store don’t do it because they want to compete. They do it because they want to get an income from providing goods or services to people. They position themselves where there is less competition and unserved markets.
Only the academics and exponents of “animal spirits” think that competition is the key thing in America. Enshrining competition for small business and not for large corporations is how we gotten into the current mess.
The key thing in the American Dream is contributing to American society and getting a fair share of the production of American society in return. No worker ever looked back from the end of life and exclaimed I was Number 1 in closing real estate sales or getting that concrete laid. No, they look back and say, “I remmember when I sold that house to the Stinsons.” or “I remember what we went through to get that part of I-295 built and rebuilt over again.”
Not one of these these things is about competiting, being competititive, or amping up the competition. They are not suspicious aspirations.
What are suspicious aspirations are the formulas for success in America that drive public policy.
I take this is frustration rhetoric without content: “We didn’t used to act like a narrow party for bitter proletarians.” I will ignore it because it is in no way true of what people have been saying and amounts to a cheap shot.
What the asshole monopolists want is not to destroy our freedom to compete; it is to ensure a situation in which they won’t have to be put under that discipline. And they will do everything including buying their own laws to do that. That’s not bitterness; that’s observation of what has happened. Having a party that is honest about that would be a breath of fresh air. Having a party that does not engage in that kind of business would be a major reform.
As long as the lobbying industry exists, is that likely to happen? They would be “shirking their duty to their paying clients” if it did.
Gotta say, that while agree with a lot of what you say here, you’re misapplying the word competition.
When I used it, I meant that people could sell a shovel and some paint and pay their mortgage and save for their kids to maybe go to college.
No, the point isn’t to beat the next shovel seller. The point is to have a damn chance to sell your own.
Then the word “competition” has been associated with something good about the US economy to which it really does not refer.
I wonder how that happened in the way Americans think. What with sports and all.
“Competitiion” has a very specific meaning and function in a market economy. “Pure competition”, also called cuthroat competition is the equilibrium at which all profits tend toward zero. Yet, that’s what’s being said is created with deregulation and preferential business taxes and all the poetry about “animal spirits” (i.e. cutting throats). And yet, Wall Street’s expectationa are that businesses have double digit returns on investment. That entire environment is what small businesses must contend with. So the activities are a free-for-all including bribery, fraud, and other rigging of the system with the excuse that “we must stay competitive”. Why must you? Why should government or customers or workers or communities cut you slack because you must stay competitive? It is invocation of the magic word “competitition” as a way to tell people to shut up about being ripped off. The logic is that I gotta rip you off in order for my family to survive and me to build a billion dollar empire. And conservatives cheer and too many liberals defer to that logic. Even progressives get sucked into the notion that competition builds value (or values, depending on whether we are talking economics or culture).
When what most sane people want is to contribute something to the betterment of society and be able to support their families at the same time instead of getting the clean-nose do-good discount in income for “psychic satisfaction”. We pay people higher to break the law and be abusive, have you noticed?
That’s a long way of saying you agree with me?
Is it?
I’m not sure.
When I talk about competition, it means a chance to compete. Obviously, you need competition or you’ll pay too much for shitty paint and shovels. Either that, or you’ll pay with closed shops, a loss of the local business class, local power, local wealth, and business competition for your labor. If you can’t choose between at least two sellers, you’re going to lose out as a consumer either at the checkout counter or in every other way.
All you have to do to see my point better is to try an exercise. Try looking at these arrangement as if no one is a consumer (at least, no one is a consumer first) and that everyone is a producer.
In other words, and this is increasingly true in our make-do gig economy, we’re first and foremost producers of something even if it is only labor. Only incidentally are we consumers, and our consumer interests are secondary.
In this view, anything that reduces the price we can charge for our labor or the profit we can make from our products and services is bad for us and bad for our communities, even if it might serve us well as consumers.
This doesn’t eliminate our interest in the cost of gas or groceries but it puts them in their proper place. We want to be able to compete which means that we want to be able to open a business that can make a profit or we want to be able to take our labor and put it on the market and have people bid for it.
Monopolies destroy this system, which is why Democrats used to fight it like cats and dogs. Even Republicans agreed.
The kind of competition you describe is in the interest of furthering market consolidation. If it isn’t going to be malign and distorting, it must be balanced with very aggressive antitrust enforcement.
You are viewing the situation as a consumer instead of a producer, a buyer instead of a seller. Those who buy want choices–that are real choices. What happens is that as competition becomes more perfect the difficulty of creating new real choices causes a race to the bottom and crapification of the market (Gresham’s Law).
Producers absolutely don’t want competition (except by well-heeled clients bidding up their goods and services). No merchant is pleased with a similar merchant plopping across the street from him (unless it is a weird comparison market like auto sales).
Yes, monopolies do destroy this system in certain predictable ways generally outlined in the “imperfect competition” chapter of an introductory economics text. So do monopsonies, oligopolies, and oligopsonies, which each act in different ways from monopolies.
If you can’t choose between two job offers, you lose out as a worker. If you can’t choose between two clients, you are a captured vendor.
But competition is not the great god to which to sacrifice everything. Nor does that relieve the necessity of having infrastructure that is not competitive but is reined in through direct political means.
Antitrust enforcement is only one of the strict regulation regimes that can keep a vital market vital and working for both buyers and sellers.
But it requires sensitivity to what goods and services are best rationed to the highest bidder and what goods and services are required for everyone. This is what most countries have done better than the US for the past 40 years.
Yes, pure competition results in market consolidation and various economic crises. What do you think that Marx wrote about in Capital during the midst of some of those 19th century crises and panics. Time to bring Marx in from the cold on Capital, taking into account the many ways capitalist economies have tried to work around his analysis without seeing the fundamental issue he raises. It is this that causes liberals (in the FDR sense) to try to keep clear of the left.
The main difficulty is legislated into employer-employee law. A workers’ party would take a close look there. Not that dealing with monopsony of employers is not also an issue.
We are not in total agreement on this; there is more nuance. But we are close.
Likely one will have to create the narrative after one has all of the moving parts in place. Workers as consumers; workers as producers; workers as citizens; workers as organizers of production.
I’m debating a Hegelian. This will try my patience.
I’ll try not to let the scars of my philosophy department prejudice me against you.
Just know that I tend to react violently to this kind of terminology dependent system-based reasoning.
I’ve adopted a mode of communication designed to get as far away from that as possible, both because I write about politics for the semi-initiated and because I’m philosophically of the opinion that Hegel should be dug up and shot.
That seems a confession that you can’t relate to practical experience in real companies, real small business, real non-profits or real government agencies. A lot of what I say has been drawn from reflection on my experiences in all of those over against the course work in economics, political science, and (later) management that I took. The nuts and bolts of how the economy works. The fact that a shipping department will ship lots of goods on December 31 and get them back as returns after New Years just so the deliveries can be booked in the current fiscal year so that everyone gets their bonus.
The fact that not a few non-profit and government agency managers are obsessed with picking loose paper clips off the floor and few private for-profit firms are.
And that every business organization tries to find a niche in which they do NOT have to compete and also tries to transfer costs to other people.
That must have been a brutal course of study if you are still having Hegelian flashes triggered by what I write. Post-Philosophy Stress Disorder.
It’s not a confession of that sort at all.
What you’re doing is a M.C. Escher flip, where depending on how you look at it a person is either a beneficiary of competition (for their labor, or as a consumer seeking choices, quality, and low cost) or the victim of competition (as a person seeking to create a monopoly for themselves or a captive market for their products).
This is your lack of consistency in focus rather than my lack of clarity in communication.
Some trends on the horizon will illustrate TarHeel’s point….”America today has the lowest minimum wage in nearly 50 years, adjusted for inflation. As a result, people are often looking for better jobs. But according to the New York Times, about 1 in 5 American workers is now locked in with a non-compete clause in an employment contract.”
Non-Compete clauses
1 in 5 is a shocking figure, considering how little press it is getting…
And can we look for pre-emptive wage scale battles? Yes, we can.
French unions punch above their weight, too. Or at least they did until Hollande…
Small businesses have less economic power to shape markets and the political power to buy politicians.
Small businesses do still exist and they have small margins because perfect competition causes profits to tend toward zero.
If you are not going to enforce competitive markets, you might as well go full lefty and deal with the economy with strict regulation and government infrastructure within a mixed system. Europe has been experimenting with various forms of mixed systems but with the siren song of markets scrambling their approaches in many different directions. Scandanavia, which once was though to have “the” answer, is backpeddling toward more conservative and privatized approaches.
The appeal is placing limits on predatory economic power.
two distinct categories. In rural setting the situation is small businesses/ farms and a key factor what’s important imo is local ownership of/ control of substantial (relative to Europe) amounts of land. perhaps binary categories employer/ employee should be revised and a third category added. oligarchy, of course, has it’s own ideas about where to go with this. also too, in rural situation with the hollowed out fed gov there are very few points of intersection between citizens and fed gov – VA being a principal one. any effective constituent services?
Increasingly in rural areas contacts with the federal government are being frames as in conflict. A good part of rural areas deal with the Bureau of Land Management, the USDA (down to state passthrough agencies), and what is left of the federal agricultural banking system. And through legislative changes and budget cuts, the VA is being crapified and bringing more frequent veteran complaints. Even Social Security and the US Postal Service have been disconnected from people in rural areas.
Yes, local ownership and operator ownership of farmland have become a real economic and political changes; often ownership is totally outside the local community. At the same time, small, local, owners who are farming, especially minority owners (African American, Indian, Hispanic-American) even with long time property rights have those property rights in danger.
yes, to all your observations. and local ownership of land is a huge issue. even when states have laws the $$ do their best to circumvent and often succeed. all the agencies you mention, with proper staffing are a freebie re: changing how ppl see the fed gov. the current perceptions result of the R strategy with cutbacks, cuts in staffing.
Did the left “prepare” for the Progressive Era?
Are you high?
Which left and how?
And where did all those affluent reform-minded ladies and Republican businessmen come from in the Progressive Era?
Have you become so sucessful that that you’ve entered the bubble and ordinary mortals are beneath your dignity now?
I find the notion of preparation helpful for planning and lousy for analysis after the fact. History is what happens while you think you are working your plan.
Please. Just admit that you said something foolish.
The 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th amendments didn’t emerge out of thin air. And that’s just scratching the surface of the work that went into building up for the reforms of the Progressive Era.
Did the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th amendments emerge from anything that was a self-conscious left? Or was that even a category at that point?
Who did build the reforms of the Progressive Era? One of the oft-acknowledged groups was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
The League of Women Voters.League of American Wheelmen, US Highway associations and Good Roads associations, National Auto Trails Association, Direct Legislation League, American Bar Association, American Law School Association,
Who are their counterparts today?
Or better asked, who are their counterparts that would be acceptable into the sort of workers party that you describe?
Quite a remarkable turn around in a matter of weeks before the UK Election … a lesson for Democrats in the U.S.?
○ Theresa May’s popularity has fallen further than any Prime Minister in recent history
○ Don’t slip backwards, David Cameron warns infighting Tories
“We on the centre right side of the argument have to have just as inspiring a vision, a more inspiring vision, of how you build not just a strong economy but a strong society and a better life,” he told the newspaper.
Asked why young people were associating idealism with Corbyn’s Labour and not the Conservatives, he said: “I think we need to push it more.”
Cameron took the Conservatives on a path of “modernisation” towards embracing social change such as gay marriage and tackling climate change, after he won the leadership contest against David Davis in 2005.
The former prime minister suggested the Tories’ failure to make an economic argument during the election meant voters had “forgotten just how dangerous this full-on programme of nationalisation, state control and rampantly high taxes can be”.
“You don’t win the argument in favour of free enterprise, free markets, choice and liberal democracy and then pack up and go home,” Cameron said. “You have to win the argument in every generation.
○ The article that changed my view … of Corbyn’s role as Labour leader | The Guardian |
Don’t look back to compare and “learn” from history. Engage with young people and witness contemporary society, its needs and where the federal government should step in to lend a hand for economic development. Europe too had to shut their coal mines, remember PM Thatcher. Same with the Dutch, Belgians and French. Angela Merkel of Germany managed to set a timeline to shut down nuclear power stations and in a fortnight introduced legislaton for gay marriage. Americans are truly conservative on such matters under false pretence. Basically, candidate Corbyn manages to engage with voters/people as was seen with the Grenfell Tower disaster. The Night of Jeremy Corbyn
It’s a great link and well worth the read.
It is no small irony that the Blairites sound just like Booman’s piece here.
There is a generational shift at work around the world.
That movement embraces what might be called old style social-democratic policies.
If you read between the lines here lately you can hear the struggle to avoid ideas that might be termed re-distributionist, or that make any reference to class.
You can see that in the reference to making things better for everyone.
#StrongerTogether
That was, after all, the lesson the neo-liberals thought they had learned. Modern day capitalists were no robber barrons. Unions are no longer relevant.
On this they were, as Booman is here, oh so wrong.
All 6 recent posts on front page issues have been troll rated. This person has become an imposter of him/herself with regard to the 2nd amendment.
[Erasmus of Rotterdam]
Thx to all for the correction, much appreciated.
That’s exactly what it is and what the Democratic Party stands for. Exemplified by Hillary Clinton, Debbie Wassman-Shultz and Barack Obama.
These are the most extreme Right wing of the Republican Party. They worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand. Besides, Dems love all that dark money and multi-million dollar contributions that Big Business and wall street provide.
I think we need to cut them some slack. Outside the south, they were born/raised to be Republicans. That goes back generations and long before Rand began scribbling her dreck which none of them bother to read anyway. The GOP has done a great job in holding onto that constituency with two consistent messages to them: 1) you all are the salt of the earth that the GOP respects and 2) Republicans will keep your taxes low and be fiscally prudent. Both are total lies, but sell a good sounding lie long enough with no challenge by the opposition and it becomes the truth to those not inclined to re-think their way of being.
On the contrary, they devoured her books in High School while the rest of us were reading Brave New World and 1984.
Like “Democrats stand for the working man?”
I roll my eyes every time some rolls out the neoliberal label. Same way I do whenever says something stupid or pointless.
If people think the modern Democratic party is the same as the Republican party or even the same as itself from the 90s they need to pay better attention. It’s a ridiculous notion on its face and I will give it the appropriate weight in a discussion.
You’re right, they’re not the same. They’re just not that different.
I recall that line from the British revue “Beyond the Fringe” in the early 1960s. A British commentator is trying to explain American politics to another Brit.
“You see, they have the Republicans, who are like our Conservative Party. And then there are the Democrats, who are like our … Conservative Party.”
And that was in the early 1960s.
yeah because nothing has changed since 1960s
<eye roll> — as promised
Yes, and one of the things that’s changed since the 1960s is that the Labor Party now (or at least until Jeremy Corbyn) resembles the Conservatives in just the same way the Democrats resemble the GOP.
sure, okay
if you say so
Just to make it clear, when I refer to the GOP for purposes of comparison, I’m not talking about Trump or the current Klown Kar in Washington, I’m talking about the classic “Bush” GOP.
The zoo now calling itself the Republican Party would make anyone left of Attila the Hun look “progressive”.
doesn’t really make your argument any stronger and that GOP doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever really did
. . . I mean something other than the (actual) GOP.”
Nice work if you can get it?
Citizens United changed everything. Perverse incentives.
I’m not sure about that. Changed had already happened. I think it just put those changes on steroids.
Why it changed everything…
“As the political theorist Wendy Brown notes in her book Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, the Supreme Court case overturning a century of campaign finance law, Citizens United, wasn’t just about viewing corporations as political citizens. Kennedy’s opinion was also about viewing all politics as a form of market activity. The question, as he saw it, was is how to preserve a “political marketplace.” In this market-centric view, democracy, access, voice, and other democratic values are flattened, replaced with a thin veneer of political activity as a type of capital right.”
A different discussion of Chait’s piece…from a fellow who can distinguish the difference between “the relative merits of public and private provisioning of goods.” Mike Konczal
Booman’s right, of course.
We do need to stop arguing about neoliberalism.
It is dead.
Killed by its own compromises with neoconservatism and metamorphosized in neocentrism, which itself is dying a slow death as it flails arounbd trying to get rid of Trump by blaming everything and everybody on earth for its own failures.
Its funeral speech?
Its eulogy?
Its last gasp?
Sure.
Here it is, straight from the horse’s mouth:
That and her “deplorables” line just about ended the neoliberal movement…such as it was.
Which was more like the following than anything else it referenced:
A bunch of “liberals” holding their noses as they watched the (quite possibly staged) assassination of Osama bin Laden.
Joseph Conrad pinned the whole thing wauy back in 1899.
Kurtz’s final judgment on his life, his actions, mankind in general, imperialism, or his fate is one of deep and profound fear.
Fast forward 100+ years, and you have these totally entitlement-poisoned neoliberals posing for the cameras as they watched whatever they were told was happening in Afghanistan at the time.
As our wonderful almost-commanderess-in-chief exulted about Muammar el-Qadaffi’s execution in 2011:
We came; we saw; he died.”
The truth about the neoliberal hustle.
Just another imperial tactic.
You are right, Booman. Let’s stop arguing about neoliberalism. It ran its course, like any disease. And now it’s over.
Time for a new disease.
Neocentrism.
You know…whatever it takes to get rid of Trump.
The new villain.
The new Qadaafi/bin Laden/Saddam Hussein hustle.
Watch.
S.
Or…maybe time travel is possible.
Maybe they were really watching the anti-police racial riots outside St. Louis, in Baltimore and Oakland and Philadelphia and Chicago.
Or…maybe they were simply watching the 2016 election returns.
Whatever…and whether they realized it or not…they were watching the end of neoliberalism.
It failed.
Next…???
AG
Nalbar, marduk et al:
Centrist trolls. Nothing more and nothing less.
Here are the solutions to this ongoing bullshit:
1-If you see them troll rating valid posts, refrain from uprating until there is more than one downrate…a single rating means nothing, only multiple ratings count… then “4” them to death.
2-Downrate them every time they poke their miserable heads above water in a comment or reply.
This is not dKos. Send them back to the centrist hell from which they come.
Thank you and good night.
AG
Nalbar, marduk et al:
Centrist trolls. Nothing more and nothing less.
Here are the solutions to this ongoing bullshit:
1-If you see them troll rating valid posts, refrain from uprating until there is more than one downrate…a single rating means nothing, only multiple ratings count… then “4” them to death.
2-Downrate them every time they poke their miserable heads above water in a comment or reply.
This is not dKos. Send them back to the centrist hell from which they come.
Thank you and good night.
AG
Quite possibly the most unintentionally stupid thing you’ve ever written.
We shall see, Booman.
Just because I disagree with your conclusions does not mean that I am “stupid.” I see things differently from my position in life than do you.
I think that the entire Democratic Party…if it does not soon reorganize its whole approach…is doomed to massive failure. Not necessarily a total electoral failure…not yet…but a moral failure beyond words.
The whole, system-supported middle is compressing towards the center, leaving more and more people isolated on the outside of its self-imposed boundaries. There will come a time…sooner or later…when there are more people excluded outside of that artificially constructed and maintained “center” than there are inside. When that balance changes, another, even more radically non-linear event like Trump’s rise to power will happen….they call them “revolutions” in the history books, and they are always nasty. Only a change in viewpoint from the middle will prevent that, and in my view only the Democratic Party has even an outside shot at that sort of change. If it continues on its constantly compressing, morally compromising trek towards the middle…the Schumer/Pelosi middle, the Clinton/Obama middle…then there will be no longer be a legally constituted part of the system that truly tries the represent the excluded.
The excluded…something like Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables,” but including those abandoned by the left, the center and the right.
I do not know when that will happen, but the process is already under way.
When the “deplorables” outnumber the center and cannot be bought off because of economic problems, then we will see the shit hit the fan.
Watch.
Only the Democrats can turn that fan off, and they are not even trying to do it.
Not yet.
Maybe not ever.
We shall see.
Won’t we.
AG
Is that why you put up with us week after week when you could be enjoying yourself on a gig?
We, the squirrely remnant of yellow-dog Democrats are in your view the best hope for humankind?
That’s kind of an astounding act of faith, AG.
So it goes, Tarheel.
I do keep trying.,
AG
Nalbar, marduk et al:
Centrist trolls. Nothing more and nothing less.
Here are the solutions to this ongoing bullshit:
1-If you see them troll rating valid posts, refrain from uprating until there is more than one downrate…a single rating means nothing, only multiple ratings count… then “4” them to death.
2-Downrate them every time they poke their miserable heads above water in a comment or reply.
This is not dKos. Send them back to the centrist hell from which they come.
Thank you and good night.
AG
You are charitable. My comparison is to the other end.
Thank you, AG, for the clearest example in this thread that the term “neoliberal” has been stripped off all meaning and has become just a term of abuse. People like you use “neoliberal” the way that some others like to call Republicans “fascists” or “Nazis”.
You.
And your troll brigade.
Neofascists.
Deal wid it.
AG
Neoliberalism is merely a way to compromise. Unions are bad and far too powerful. You bet we need to cut them down to size; the government is a huge bureaucracy and can’t get anything right, we need more privatization. Agreed lets privatize prisons; and those school teachers can’t be fired or teach, just look at the scores. Let’s compromise and privatize that too. Raise the minimum wage? Why those are entry level jobs and besides you will cause an inflation. Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Social security should be taxed and means tested. We can all agree to that. And everyone should take care of themselves, so let’s have a health insurance plan with high deductibles so folks don’t misuse it. We need small government since we all agreed to privatize things. Cut them damn high taxes. They are far too high. We need a global economy if we are to lead the world. OK will NAFTA and TPP help? And those nasty bastards in the middle east need to be taught a lesson. It is only patriotic so lets increase defense spending and cut food stamps or something. Sounds reasonable to me. And don’t even talk to me about student debt. They brought that on themselves. Same for the people who bought houses they couldn’t afford. And my heavens, if the fed didn’t help out the banks we would be in a world of hurt. One last thing – the Tea Party has been acting up lately so we need a few votes to keep paying the debt, you can help out there right? I’m sure we can work something out. And on and on it goes.
Do you think they see the contradiction or do they think all workers are stupid? I mean in addition to thinking all workers are stupid.
“It’s actually a feature of a two-party system where whoever wins has to govern for everyone.” You and the Democrats may believe in this statement but not a single Republican does, which is why the two-party system has dramatically failed.
I kind of knew that the term “neoliberal” was void of meaning when Our Progressive Betters explained that Hillary Clinton was both a neoliberal and a neoconservative. And now we’ve got AG explaining that she’s also a neocentrist.
I’m increasingly convinced that neoliberalism is an outdated descriptor, and one that exists in zombie form only. At most, it simply is a pejorative meaning “capitalism I hate” or “politicians I hate” – and that may be a charitable description. It’s a form of intellectual laziness.
Neoliberalism:
AG