Paul Sweezy's words from 72 years ago seem a propos here:
"The critique of Keynesian theories of liberal capitalist reform starts
not from their economic logic [which is sound] but rather from their faulty (usually implicit) assumptions about the relationship, or perhaps one should say lack of relationship, between economics and political action. The Keynesians tear the economic system out of its social context and treat it as though it were a machine to be sent to the repair shop there to be overhauled by an engineer state.
"The presupposition of liberal reform is that the state in capitalist society is, at least potentially, an organ of society as a whole which can be made to function in the interests of society as a whole. Now historically
the state in capitalist society has always been first and foremost the guarantor of capitalist property relations. "
>From Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, pp. 348-9.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant http://www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math
---------- Original Message ---------- From: Charles Brown <cb31450 at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Stiglitz on Piketty in Harper's Date: Mon, 1 Sep 2014 13:18:21 -0400
Yep
On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 2:10 PM, michael yates <mikedjyates at msn.com> wrote:
> Gene Coyle has some choice quotes from Stiglitz, indicating a rather preposterous view of capitalism. During the OWS uprising, Stiglitz, Krugman, and some other celebrity liberal economists made pronouncements. I wrote a short post (OWS and the Celebrity Economists, at cheapmotelsandahotplate.org) about this and said,
>
> I applaud these economists for abandoning some of their past views. That they have endorsed OWS is a good thing, too. However, what they have to tell us is not particularly enlightening, nor will it shift the balance of power in the United States solidly in favor of the 99 percent.
>
> Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Economics Prize winner and former president of the World Bank, summed up the liberal view nicely in his remarks to the OWS occupiers:
>
> "You are right to be indignant. The fact is that the system is not working right. It is not right that we have so many people without jobs when we have so many needs that we have to fulfill. Its’ not right that we are throwing people out of their houses when we have so many homeless people. Our financial markets have an important role to play. They’re supposed to allocate capital, manage risks. We are bearing the costs of their misdeeds. There’s a system where we’ve socialized losses and privatized gains. That’s not capitalism; that’s not a market economy. That’s a distorted economy, and if we continue with that, we won’t succeed in growing, and we won’t succeed in creating a just society."
>
> Almost every sentence after the first one is wrong. The sentences about the unemployed and the homeless would be fine on their own, but unfortunately they follow the one that says that “the system is not working right.” How so? It is working exactly as capitalist systems work. They have always been marked by poles of wealth and poverty, periods of speculative bubbles followed by recessions or depressions, overworked employees and reserve armies of labor, a few winners and many losers, alienating workplaces, the theft of peasant lands, despoiled environments, in a word, the rule of capital. Losses are always socialized, and gains are always privatized. It is impossible to create a society that is both just and capitalist.
>
> The other liberal economists named above have made statements similar to those of Stiglitz. They all believe that capitalism can be made to function in the interests of the majority, for the 99 percent as it were, if only we had a government that would regulate it appropriately. And they all think that if it hadn’t been for the neoliberal period of market fundamentalism ushered in by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, we’d still all be—in the words of Stiglitz and Krugman’s friend and fellow economist, J. Bradford Delong—”slouching toward utopia.” That it could be in the nature of capitalism, in the working out of its laws of motion, that the problems we face are rooted doesn’t enter their minds.
>
>
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