Isn’t this repulsive?
Ahh, capitalism. Blogging stocks comments on the candidates and how they would affect the market and economy:
U.S. Senator Barack Obama — Market Impact: Negative, likely higher car MPG requirements, tougher environmental regulations, health care reforms, and other reforms, would weigh on the auto, raw material/mineral, health care, pharma and other sectors. Economic Impact: Neutral to Negative…it seems likely that his health care, education, and energy initiatives would require a substantial tax increase.
Of course, any regulation is bad for the market. Unfettered capitalism is the only way! And of course, any investment in our country is ipso factobad for it. It may be true that unfettered capitalism will, in the short term, increase GDP and will certainly make investors more money. But this “pragmatic” attitude is, in my opinion, incredibly damaging. The result of deregulation, or what this article calls “market-based” solutions advocated by the republicans (all neutral to positive) will be a few rich people, a few rich companies and not much else. What these people call small government is actually cutting taxes for the wealthy and cutting services for the poor…sort of the anti-Robin Hood. And this is what democrats should stand against. We do not want a country where we choose not to provide health care to every person because Wall Street might not like it. Wall Street can suck it as far as I am concerned. We would hate to end up like Sweden, in an economic downward spiral.
March 14th, 2007 09:45
Yes, I agree. The idea of “market-based” solutions is a myth in which its proponents hypostatize the abstraction of “the market” and attribute human qualities to it. The market is never unregulated! Instead, it is always regulated with varying degrees of democratic participation in its regulation. “Deregulation” means reducing this regulatory participation to a handful of elites in the government, big business, and big finance. They use the myth of the market to cover up this antiegalitarianism. (For this view, I’m drawing on the sociologist, Karl Polanyi’s _The Great Transformation_.) We need to demystify the market and to promote widespread education about the economy so that all citizens can participate collectively in its regulation. For specific policies that could be included in this radical democracy, I like the ideas proposed in Andre Gorz’s _Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-based Society_ (I’m quoting here political theorist, Chris Buck’s unpublished analysis): three policies needed “to reduce necessary labor time and provide people with more time and freedom to engage in a wide variety of activities besides work”: 1) “an unconditional, guaranteed sufficient income for everyone”; 2) “the redistribution of work and collective control over free time”; and 3) “policies in urban planning that provide people with the resources they need to engage in activities other than work” (e.g., “local exchange trading systems,” in which partcipants “provide goods and services to other members in exchange for credit that can then be redeemed for goods and services offered by the other participants. While the credit resembles money insofar as it overcomes the limitations of a barter economy, the credit always remains within the local exchange system and eventually loses its value over time in order to prevent one participant from horading credit as means of achieving dominance over the other members.”")
March 14th, 2007 11:48
I think the dichotomy is somewhat false. As a descriptive matter, market-based and traditional new-deal style regulations both involve a small group of technicians determining the way we should regulate something. The democratic participation (as with most legislation in American democracy) comes through elections and interest group participation. This is not to say that it’s good, but rather that there is nothing inherent to market-based solutions that makes them any less democratic than say, I don’t know, medicaid. Unless you want to overhaul our democracy entirely (which I think you want to do), the basic composition of most regulation (whether market-based or not) is 20% democratic/80% technocratic.
That’s not to say the Bush administration hasn’t attempted to dilute the democratic component. They have. But it’s not through the implementation of anti-democratic solutions, but through the process in which they’ve arrived at their decisions.
And market-based just means that technicians don’t figure out the caps but create an exchange that lets companies figure out the caps. I guess in that sense you can say they delegate the ultimate decision to the market. But the same democratic mechanisms exist in both situations to correct error. In the case of the technicians, we can just elect new technicians if we hate their caps. In the case of the market-based types, we can just elect new people who we know will eliminate the market-based solution in favor of traditional caps (I’m thinking of environmental regulation here, like regulating carbon emissions).
I’m not saying that correcting error is easy. Nor am I saying our democracy is perfect. There are plenty of barriers (single-member districts, redistricting, faulty voting machines, felon disenfranchisment) that inhibit full democratic participation and distort the results of our elections. There are plenty of changes we can and should make. But I think it’s really weird to point to the merits of some piece of legislation and say it’s undemocratic if the same faulty process produces something you think is democratic. It seems like you’re really arguing against the merits of their decisions on grounds that it violates basic democratic process. But assuming Obama is elected under the current regime, how would any regulation he enforce be any more democratic (if we accept the current system is democratically infirm)?