On 12/10/2010 5:41 PM, Mike Beggs wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 2:14 AM, Matthias Wasser
> <matthias.wasser at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> But it's been really
>> fascinating to see the public discourse among the political class, which has
>> framed the question explicitly in terms of what's necessary to "save
>> capitalism."
On the narrow question of discourse around "saving capitalism," it should be pointed out that capitalism is a word with a lot of positive valence in many quarters nowadays - sort of like "democracy." So even if capitalists had no social power, it shouldn't be surprising that politicians would talk openly this way.
Mike Beggs wrote:
> For me the lesson of the crisis has been how strong conservative
> ideology around balanced budgets etc has remained, even among the
> technocrats, even though it's systemically dysfunctional.
It's dysfunctional for profits, but is it systemically dysfunctional? If the "system" in question is pure market-capitalist-type social relations, large (but not catastrophic) persistent output gaps seem to be system-reinforcing, at least so far.
SA