The heart of a leftist/Last time

[Brad De Long]

>On Wed, 12 Jul 2000, Brad De Long wrote:
>
>>  And I think it is fair to say that this mode of thought is deeply
>>  rooted in the writings of Karl Marx, who spent so much time
>>  denouncing private ownership of the means of production as a blocker
>>  of human liberty
>
>Heiner Mueller, the Ueberdissident of the Eurostate, once said to an
>interviewer that the end of the Eastern bloc meant the end of a
>seventy-year attempt to disprove Karl Marx (Marx being, as we know, a
>radical democrat and keen admirer of the many virtues of capitalism).
>
>I'm still waiting to hear about how the 4 billion people in the Third
>World are supposed to compete head-on with the likes of Microsoft and
>Mitsubishi without the benefit of those tenacious, clever developmental
>states that the IMF is doing its murderous best to annihilate. Or is
>neoliberalism just another word for roadkill capitalism?
>
>-- Dennis

Developmental states seem to work in northwest Europe, east Asia--and 
not very well elsewhere. So unless you can reproduce the cultural and 
bureaucratic institutions of Sweden, France, Korea, or Taiwan, I 
think--I *think*--you're better off following the neoliberal path 
than feeding the maw of what will in all likelihood turn out to be an 
anti-developmental state.

But the options are not good ones...

Brad DeLong