>Me too, with one qualification: Nader's political action (on auto safety)
>is by this point responsible for tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of
>people continuing to reside on the planet who would otherwise be dead or
>maimed. That's an achievement which very few can match, and gives him a
>basic level of credibility among the big public that's hard to compete
>with. Someone said criticizing that Nader was like criticizing Mother
>Teresa. That's why.
That may be true, but I loved Hitchens' book on Mother Teresa.
It's great that Nader saved lots of lives. There's a lot to admire about the guy, and I even voted for him in '96. But he doesn't really have a political economy to speak of. He's got a rhetoric of corporate malfeasance, a rhetoric of monopoly, a rhetoric of state abuse, but no analysis of the normal operations of capitalism. He's given to romantic dreams about the beauties of competition, which, along with his other beloved instrument, litigation, is corrosively atomizing.
Doug