Economics and Politics

My initial political leanings, if you can call it that, came from a childhood steeped in conservatism. I remember clearly hearing talk about "welfare queens" bankrupting the country and how union workers were lazy and were a real drag on corporate growth and profits. My parents were big fans of Reagan and thought that taxes were basically always wasted on someone who didn't deserve them. I read Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" when I was about 22 and went through a libertarian phase which I now see as hopelessly naive. For the libertarian and hard-core right-wingers, personal property is sacrosanct: taxes are an immoral theft of the government, a "transfer of wealth" from the rightful owner to some undeserving social parasite.



Much like with pure communism, the ultimate intellectual failure of such a libertarianism is not so much in its theory but in its application to society. What we observe is that in a perfectly free state, a sort of Darwinian struggle for survival ensues that does not typically end well for the vast majority of the public. The strong (and the lucky, and those born rich) not only survive, but they accelerate their acquisition of a disproportionate amount of goods from the economy. Not only that, but the powerful learn to use the levers of government power to acquire more wealth as well. These laissez-faire systems are corrosive to themselves -- they self-destruct as greed, corruption and short-sightedness destroy the very free market they purport to capitalize upon. As inequality widens, angry mobs begin to demand change. And history can show us this sort of thing again and again.
Logically, one must ask how many of the regulations and rules and antitrust practices today (those that do still survive) came about? The correct answer is that in all areas of new private activity, each sphere likely began with no regulation at all. Obviously the United States had a period in which there was very little regulation and accountability, leading to the "Robber Baron" period of monopolies and terrible working conditions for laborers: "conservatism at any cost". And when the majority of us realized how badly that worked out, we decided to use our vote for our own self-interest. Thus the government began to intervene only when, as was definitely the case in the Sherman Antitrust Act, monopolization and the concentrating wealth of the few begins to cripple the notion of a freely competitive system. In many ways, our society today is less competitive and more "unfair" than even in 1890, when this Act was passed. Gilbraith describes our hybrid economy today as a "Predator State".
I am a self-described liberal today as a result of years of thinking and reading about politics and the nature of society. People like John Rawls influenced my outlook of how a country must be constructed -- one that cannot guarantee equal outcomes but must present fairly equal opportunities through free public education and couple the opportunity of public goods to a strong social safety net for those who cannot capitalize on them.
Of course to libertarians/conservatives, Locke's famous proviso that each may appropriate only so much of the world's resources as leaves others with "enough, and as good" a share is fundamentally immoral and flawed. But it is in the self-interest of those who are successful to keep the mob fed and happy. If we do not have a system of taxation that ensures basic needs are met for the populace -- reviled as "redistribution of wealth" -- then the rich will suffer much more for it than a mere few percent on their bottom lines. For not only do they depend upon "the masses" but they owe their success to them. It is, after all, their consumption that keeps the corporate profits pouring in for the elites.
The rich also depend upon ignorance and apathy towards political action. And that is the greatest irony of modern-day Republicans/conservatives: in promising that gov't is always "the problem" they take away from themselves the only recourse that citizens of our democratic society have in fulfilling the promise of the Constitution's Premble.

to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

The Founders of this country obviously believed that they could literally engineer a society that provided these things. They believed that government was, in fact, the solution. Today's "conservatives" (and I use that term with sneer quotes and disdain because most of those to whom it is self-referential do not deserve it) not only do not have faith enough in the citizenry to believe that, but don't even grasp that this concept is possible.
Do I possess the faith that so-called conservatives are lacking? Perhaps not. But I share with them a basic optimism that our system and form of democracy is the best available, although it is not the best it can be. I share Lippmann's sense of both pessimism and optimism:

In his 1922 treatise “Public Opinion,” the young Walter Lippmann dealt a blow to Progressive Era dreams of a rational, well-functioning mass democracy. In the modern world, Lippmann argued, the number and intricacy of policy issues and the human tendency to cling to irrational stereotypes had rendered the public far less capable of enlightened deliberation than liberals had long supposed...
For all the bleakness of “Public Opinion,” Lippmann concluded on a curiously optimistic note. In his coda, he claimed that despite everything he had said in the previous 250 pages, he rejected the notion that “intelligence, courage and effort cannot ever contrive a good life for all men.” The preceding years of world war and crisis, Lippmann said, offered models of inspiration as well as despair, and a new realism might yet beat back “the brutality and the hysteria” of modern life.

One problem with conservatives is their starry-eyed nationalistic naivete. Like their religious dogma, the "greatness of America" doctrine must not be questioned or criticized. Even though we can all see parts of other societies to envy, they insist that we not admit that. Perhaps they're right that the sum of America's parts is greater than any other countries, but it is obvious that some of our parts could be improved.

I cannot say exactly how our society as a whole should be perfected. It is far easier to analyze intractable social problems that to solve them. But I can say with some measure of certainty that on most issues of economics and policy, right-wing Republicans are likely to decrease America's greatness by kowtowing to radical libertarianism. On the other hand, so called left-wing or liberal Democrats barely live up to their epithets, as they tend towards a center far more than some extreme Communism. Protecting workers via both unions and workplace rules, food safety, banking regulations...these things are hardly new or scary. Doing away with them, as modern Republican morons are attempting to do, has predictable consequences. Learn from history or be doomed to repeat it.