Fantasy Economics

running headlong into reality. Another excellent post from Barbara O'Brien, based on this article by Michael Lind. From Lind:

Neither Jeffersonian populists nor libertarian ideologues have the slightest clue about how to run a complex technological society in the 21st century. Why should they? Jeffersonianism is a program for a primitive society of small farmers of a kind that no longer exists anywhere. At least, once upon a time, there were genuine Jeffersonian agrarian societies in the real world. There has never been a libertarian country and there never will be, because the maximum of government authority allowed by libertarian theory is well below the minimum required by a functioning community.

I don't think I've ever seen a libertarian ask one simple question: Why do we have societies? (Randians, of course, if they think about it at all, think in terms of alpha males with no responsibility to anyone else. Even hyenas recognize the interdependence of the members of the pack.) How much government is necessary is way down the list of questions to be asked. But, now that I think on it, libertarians -- and conservatives, such as they are these days -- aren't much for asking questions.

And from O'Brien:

And it also sorta kinda goes with the last post, which points out that guys like Rand Paul, who thump their chests and declare they are going to take an axe to the federal budget, often have no clue what government does. In addition, in Paul’s case, he has no personal experience working within a large organization to provide a product or service, yet he deems himself qualified to go to Washington and decide which civil service jobs are necessary and which are not.

Lind’s point is that movement conservatives and libertarians fancy themselves to be friends of business and tough-minded economists just because they are conservatives and libertarians. It’s like the rightie bloggers who believe they must have an inherent understanding of war and the military just because they are conservative and not liberals, who of course are born with their “understanding war” gene missing.

It must be nice to live in a world where adopting a label means you don't actually have to know anything about anything.

All of which goes a long way to explain why the economy historically has done better under Democrats than Republicans: Democrats tend to focus on solutions that actually work. And the heads of major corporations have developed a habit of thought that is proving disastrous: they are focused on the next quarter's bottom line and have no interest in anything beyond that. Except their own incomes, of course.

And O'Brien makes one final, very important point:

The economies most likely to sustain themselves and survive as democracies into the 22nd century are those with strong unions and a commitment to providing a strong safety net, including national taxpayer-funded health care, unemployment benefits, education benefits that are not loans, etc. In other words, the United States is unlikely to make that cut.

The road the U.S. is on now will either lead to utter chaos or a fascist-style takeover by corporatists and the mega-wealthy. And, ironically, this is being made possible by people marching around pretending to be liberty-loving patriots who want to save the constitution.

It's not by chance that the German economy seems to have suffered the least from the recent melt-down: Germany has just those strong unions and that strong safety net that O'Brien mentions.