If it wasn’t bad enough that Alan Greenspan admitted having doubts about the power of self interest and Adam Smith’s dead hand to to regulate markets without interference from (gasp!) the governments of the world, now we have a Chief Economist for the International Monetary Fund (the leader in promoting Disaster Capitalism the wonders of globalization and free trade for over fifty years) adopting the Keynesian heresy by suggesting that governments may need to provide more stimulus spending, not less, in order to save us from the Bush Depression. Oh the shame of it all! Poor Milton Friedman must be tossing and turning under his Free Enterprise tombstone today.
PARIS (Reuters) – Governments should be ready to increase their spending on economic stimulus programs if circumstances require it, the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist Olivier Blanchard said in comments published on Tuesday.
In an interview with French daily Le Monde, Blanchard called on Germany in particular to boost its spending in the next few months as some of its European partners such as France have called for.
“The coming months will be very bad. Halting this loss of confidence, providing stimulus and, if necessary, replacing private demand are essential if we want to prevent the recession from becoming a Great Depression,” Blanchard told Le Monde.
Odd, isn’t it. We have had merry free marketers running rampant over the last three decades, waging war against the middle classes in all countries, spreading the wealth of nations to the wealthy only, a binge of unfettered free market excess which they, with their ideological blinders, championed and benefited from after Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes (and since 1994 conservative majorities in Congress) dismantled, piece by piece, the edifice of New Deal institutions which had saved our economic bacon once upon a time.
Yet now that their dreams of an unfettered capitalist utopia have all come to naught, to whom do they turn as their savior to lead them out of the hell of economic collapse into which their own misguided and foolish doctrines led them? Why Beelzebub himself: John Maynard Keynes. The very man whose policies they have savaged ever since he first came to prominence during the 1930’s. The irony would be delicious if so many of us were not suffering, losing jobs, losing homes, losing health care and in some cases literally losing our lives as a result of their destructive actions.
Still, I’m sure it’s only a temporary pause in the greater conservative movement to return us all to the paradise of Economic Feudalism the rule of Robber Barons Free Markets forever. But in the meantime, oh governments of the world, can you spare a few trillion dollars, yen, euros, pounds, et cetera, to help steer our dear capitalist leaders back to the promised land? And please, whatever you do, don’t get the idea you can try to tell us how to run our businesses. Just show us the money, and don’t ask any unnecessary questions about what we did, or plan to do, with it. Especially, don’t question the need to use those funds to brighten the lives of our senior executives this holiday season. That would be so gauche, don’t you know.
Ps. On a personal note, our family medical crisis turned out to be less serious than we had at first imagined and all is well. So here I am again, back to bore you with my meandering musings on the state of — everything. Aren’t you the lucky duckies?
There are those that would argue that Keynesian economics is just redistribution to the wealthy by the state through more obvious means, Friedman without the PR firm.
Maybe what we need is a little Ludwig Von Mises instead, with the argument that the Treasury and the Fed are by far the biggest crooks on Wall Street.
But isn’t that kinda like < whispering > socialism?!!
Curiously, the people dishing out and receiving the money don’t seem to regard government as the expression of the people, the sum of all the citizens, the representatives of the people. It’s as if the government exists above and outside the citizens. That’s why the policy makers and recipients, it seems, consider themselves accountable only to their peers and, among their peers, only to the financial players. The government prints the money, the financial world runs monetary policy. If taxpayers end up footing the bill, it’s their stupid, tough luck. You see, little people only exist to buy the junk the rich put on offer..
Who thinks that Mr. O. will really get an equitable health insurance plan in place?
Ahem.
Not to get too shrill here, but you leave out one of the top offenders in your list there.
Bill Clinton. And the “new” Democratic Party.
Seriously – you can try to blame it on the “Republican Congress”, but he not only aided and abetted – his administration actively encouraged the war on the middle class. He may not have realized he was doing it – it may be that he became convinced much like everyone else had that the rules had changed and that deregulation, less oversight, and “irrational exuberance” were the New World Order, but that doesn’t lessen the extent of his and his administrations mistakes.
NAFTA is the biggest glaring example of his mistakes, but you can look through the record and find many more. He deserves much of the blame for our current misfortune – as much as the elder Bush does at any rate. Though the truly egregious actors in this mess remain Reagan and Bush the Lesser – who never really seemed to understand what they were doing. Both Clinton and Bush the Elder seemed to understand that it was really a long con – Clinton is pretty up front about how they used the tech bubble to get out of the ’92 recession. And years ago he was advocating that Bush get out of the recession we were in at the start of the decade by inflating a “green bubble” or an “energy bubble” or something to direct investment and create jobs. Bush wouldn’t do that – tax cuts are the only fiscal policy he would contemplate. And so the “market” created a new bubble in housing instead.
With Obama I think we’ve got another guy who understands that the economy we have right now is another long con, but I don’t think we have someone who will do anything about it beyond inflating a new bubble (Clinton’s proposed “energy bubble” it seems) and riding on that for a few years. But no one is going to tackle the REAL problem that we no longer have a real, functional economy because we’ve pushed a majority of the manufacturing jobs out of this country and seem to be unwilling to make the real changed needed to rebuild a real economy (not the “tax cuts” that the companies keep saying is all they need but real changes in our health care and pension infrastructure that make us less competitive for manufacturing jobs with fucking CANADA of all places). Fundamental change will be kicked off down the road once again and life will muddle on. That’s about all I expect.
A very powerful post, nonynony, cerebral, precise and right to the core. I don’t expect much either but, I am so infuriated with the approach that Reagan, the two Bushes, and Clinton, indeed, took to this problem of adapting our economy to modern times.
IMHO they have fucked up royally. The public good does not mean what’s good for the plutocrats alone; it’s all parts of the economic spectrum. Now, we have this huge depression thing hanging over all our heads, and the suffering is just beginning. It will savage the lower and middle classes as it always does. Sure the rich will get hurt, but, they have many more shock absorbers.
I think the only ones really focusing on the central problem – the uneven distribution of political and economic power – are the progressive blogs, like this one. Thank heavens, big business and big money have not snuffed out their independence. Viva the Internet!
I am totally math phobic and only have a general grasp of what’s going on in finance world. But it seems to me these guys are like a farmer who sells all his chicken feed to his neighbor at an inflated price, starves his chickens to death and then wonders why the hell he can’t get any eggs. Am I close?
the next group of pigs coming to the trough are the commercial real estate speculators/developers:
Property Developers Request Bailout:
perhaps they should follow the lead of this noble investor:
Madoff investor found dead of suicide inside Manhattan office:
shades of 1929?
granted, the rainig of brokers on wall street is an enduring myth, but the parallels are striking.
I like to put it in simpler terms. For the last several decades, the underlying economic philosophy in most business circles has actually been, “I got mine – fuck the rest of you poor saps!”
but this is just being used to justify socialism for the wealthty, ala Governer Pattersen. The middle class still must live in the free market.
Poor Milton Friedman?
Didn’t he win the Nobel prize for inventing social Darwinism? Let’s give credit where credit is due.