dr. elsewhere here
Just a quick suggestion to check out this concise and pithy article in this month's Scientific American that points out the fact that enough evidence is in, and the laissez faire market experiment has failed, miserably.
This is good news because the analysis compares high income nations who adhere to this free-market, low-tax model - i.e., Anglo-Saxons (UK, US, Australia, Canada) - to those that adhere instead to social welfare, high-tax constraints - i.e., Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark). And the numbers don't lie. The economic health of the Nordic countries significantly exceeds that of the Anglo-Saxons. Plus, no one in those Nordic countries goes without health care or education, and the poverty rate is miniscule, even when unemployment is roughly equal that of more British countries.
And we all know, the US and its fellow members of the old British Empire have soared to shamefully high levels on lists of infant mortality, illiteracy, poor health care, prison rates, and general poverty, while Nordic countries consistently rank highest in international lists of social necessities.
The author, Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, points out, "The results for the [Nordic] households at the bottom of the income distribution are astoundingly good, especially in contrast to the mean-spirited neglect that now passes for American social policy." This situation completely refutes the standing "wisdom," originally perpetrated by Nobel laureate Friedrich Von Hayek, that high taxes are the "road to serfdom."
Sachs' conclusion: "Von Hayek was wrong. In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous social-welfare state is not a road to serfdom but rather to fairness, economic equality and international competitiveness."
And, as Thom Hartmann (who alerted his listeners to this article) has repeatedly stressed, a corporate feudalism has actually descended upon us through the low-tax, minimal social-welfare model, largely because those low taxes are also offered to robber barron corporations.
That's the bad news, which I'll address in more detail in another post soon. But don't forget the good news: high taxes and a generous social welfare demonstrably DO support healthy economies.
7 comments:
Nice shout out to Thom Hartmann - he is the best thing on radio.
Can't you Democrates wait until after the election to self destruct?
I mean we need a break from these insane Republicans even if that break is only one of insane Democrats.
The idea that we have anything like low taxes or a free market is absurd.
Republicans have only made matters worse, with crony socialism, hidden behind faux libertarian retoric.
This is nothing like a freee market.
What nonsense.
You really care more about ideology than about success, don't you? In the days of Ike and JFK, we had strong unions, and a steeply progressive tax system. We had the GI Bill, which would seem intolerably socialistic today. Those were the best days this country ever had.
Facts are facts: People living under what is here called the Nordic system simply live better than we now do. And they live longer.
Folks who value ideologically-driven theories over lived experience always conjure up the image of a guy who keeps trying to turn on a seized engine while shouting "This SHOULD work..."
joe, i'm assuming the 'you' referenced in your comment is for john sebastian and not moi. if so, thanks for saying what needed to be said with far more eloquence than i would have managed.
and mr. sebastian, ours - as exhibited in the brit empire nations - is THE MOST FREE MARKET in the world, without par.
and the point of my post and the article it links to is that the jury is now clearly in: AN UNBRIDLED 'FREE' MARKET does NOT promote a healthy economy. it only promotes unchecked greed, which immediately results in a not so free market where only the powerfully rich are free to exploit the not so rich. hence, serfdom, in the complete ironic flip from augusten. darwinian economics.
mr. sebastian, your blasting of the republican 'faux libertarian retoric' is ironic for 'calling the kettle black,' as well as not spelling it correctly.
dermo, i agree; hartmann is way far the BEST on radio, peerless.
oh good grief. instant karma for slamming a reader for a misspelling, and i one-up with a totally erroneous name!
the down side of blogging in cafes is that there are so many distractions. i won't bore you with why i typed augusten instead of von hayek, but there it is.
distraction. and age. apologize for the error and the distraction, but not for age. never!
My name is my name John sebastian, my spelling is jeffersonian - "its a small mind that can spell a word only one way"
I post under my own name and if you don't believe its my name I don't care, at least I post under my own name.
You want my address and web site? Its a mess.
The free market always works everywhere it has been tried.
Always.
To call the crony socialism that the republicans have instituted anything like a free market is simply dishonest and I expect those making the claim are fully aware of their own dishonesty.
Socialism only and inevitably leads to the gulags and death camps.
Do a google for those nordic paradises you mentioned and say search for "suicide rates" or maybe "forced sterilization".
Charming and stupid.
The American people have rejected the socialist nightmare again and again.
Heck I want the Democrats to win this November - but I fear they will take the victory as a mandate for their madness rather than the fact that americans are sick to death of Bush and his socialist "death" agenda.
This nonsense only reinforces that fear.
What do you think keeps people voting for those sickoo republicans?
"The free market always works everywhere it has been tried."
There are two misnomers in the discussion, each corrupting the other. Of course we don't live in a "free-market" state: corporate America, which depends on enormous public subsidies, wouldn't permit one.
However, Anglo-American societies *are* beset with "free market" nostrums and practices in the realm of labor and social welfare. "Free market" is, of course a euphemism for a kind of crackpot Social Darwinism and crony capitalism which appears to be all but ineradicable in the U.S. and Britain, largely because families like the Bushes are in hereditary control, with their wealth built on exploitation of labor and cronyism, not innovation.
In a sense our taxes are high -- despite being among the lowest of all industrial democracies -- but only because we don't get free health care for it, as the rest of the world does (along with a host of other benefits working Americans can only dream of).
As for the notion that free markets always work -- there is no such animal as a free market, anywhere in the world, so the claim is vacuous, even without noting the disasters that unregulated market behavior routinely introduces into mass societies.
If you want a true model of stability and prosperity, you'll need to go back to the regulatory frameworks of Bretton Woods, which oversaw unprecedented world-wide growth and stability, at least in the West, also laying the foundation for the prosperity of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.
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