11 reasons America's a new socialist economy

[Zorro]

Interesting commentary.

<snip>

Welcome to the conservative's worst nightmare: The law of unintended consequences. Why? Nobody wants to admit it, folks, but the conservatives' grand ideology is backfiring, actually turning the world's greatest capitalistic democracy into the world's newest socialist economy.

A little history: The core principles of conservative economic ideology are grounded in Nobel economist Milton Friedman's 1962 classic "Capitalism and Freedom." Too late to stop President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, those principles became the battle cries energizing conservatives since Reagan: Unrestricted free markets, free enterprise and free trade; deregulation, privatization and globalization; trickle-down economics and trickle-up wealth to an elite plutocracy destined to rule the new American capitalist utopia.

So what happened? Are you guys nuts? Hey, I'm talking to all you blind Beltway politicians (in both parties) ... plus the Old Boys Club running Wall Street (into the ground) ... plus all you fat-cat CEOs (with megamillion parachutes) ... and all your buddies scamming everybody else to get on the Forbes 400. You are proof of Lord Acton's warning: "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

It's backfiring! You folks turned our America from a great capitalistic democracy into a meddling socialist economy. Still you don't get it. You're acting like teen addicts tripping on an overdose of "greed-is-good" testosterone while your caricature of conservative economics would at best make a one-line joke on Jay Leno...

<snip>

More at:http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/eleven-reasons-america-new-top/story.aspx?guid=%7BD23E1901%2D728E%2D4A3C%2D99D1%2D7E80F74C3AE3%7D

[checks-n-balances]

1. All of us should read this

And send it out to those who are at least somewhat ready to lisen...

[Patchuli]

2. Excellent...big K&R

Scary and true. Thanks GOP.

[struggle4progress]

3. Uh, paul? Corporations control America's political economy. That's not socialism. Nice try, though.

[Daveparts]

4. How is America Becoming

a socialist economy? He never does say, just that conservatives have done bad things, well duh. A socialist economy has universal healthcare, and real unemployment insurance. A socialist economy taxes industry to pay for social programs America's economy taxes the middle class to pay for white collar welfare. A socialist economy? We should be so lucky!

[eomer]

5. I couldn't read past reason number 1 of 11.

He is totally confused about the meaning of the term "cognitive dissonance" in this part:

1. Dumber than a fifth grader with cognitive dissonance
Kids know what it means. They know most adults today can't see past the end of their noses. Liberals tune out candidate McBush for being lost in the past. Conservatives can't hear Obama without seeing that turban.
Cognitive dissonance simply means most brains cannot see past their own narrow ideologies. They dismiss any data that contradicts their old ideologies. Whether you're a conservative Republican or liberal Democrat, you only hear what you already know is "true." All else is tuned out.

Cognitive dissonance means simultaneously holding contradictory ideas and having an uneasy feeling as a result.

The term that he should have used is "confirmation bias", which means rejecting everything that conflicts with your existing beliefs and accepting only that which confirms them.

I'm not sure whether this gross blunder makes him dumber than a fifth grader but it at least makes him dumber than a college graduate.

[izzybeans]

6. The dude seems to be confusing a lot of things in his essay.

[Sentath]

7. I read the first page pretty thoroughly

And I think he is using the words "socialized" and "socialist" as replacements for 'fucked up'

4. Deregulation creating new socialist housing system

Back in 1999 a Democratic president and Republican Congress were in love with a fantasy called the "new economics." Enthusiastic lobbyists invented the brilliant idea of dismantling the wall between commercial and investment banking: They killed the Glass-Steagall Act that was keeping the sleazy hands of short-term hustlers out of the pockets of long-term lenders.

Flash forward: We lost 85-year-old Bear Sterns and $32 billion IndyMac. Lehman's iffy. And 90 banks. With the virtual takeover of Freddie and Fanny, Wall Street's grand experiment with free-market ideology is backfiring, having socialized the housing market. They have nobody to blame but their self-centered greed.

I do not see how those lines make any possible sense without my translation table.

[Joe Chi Minh]

8. I think he means they've been interfering in the market, but in favour of

the corporate behemoths, cartels and big business generally.

In other words, replacing Adam Smith's emphatic, unashamed mixed-economy Socialism, with the interests of the country, the general population, paramount, with government by the large corporations, Mussolini and Hiter's corporatism; trammeling all the smaller business concerns, preventing their operating freely and competitively.

The heavy-weight vested interests Smith wanted to neutralise in his day, in order to allow businessmen to do what they do best, furthering the public interest (albeit accidentally, since he saw them as essentially ruthlessly cynical self-absorbed swine, who had to kept as far away from government as humanly possible), although always within the constraints of the public interest, have now been replaced by government by cartels, via their hired lobbysists and the politicians they buy.

As Mythsage once put it, "Why would anyone trust Big Business more than Big Government." Or words to that effect. The advanced countries of Europe, most notably of course in Scandavia, are like the rest of us, always under siege, from the pyschos of the right, but the people have managed to impress upon their politicans that they won't put up with having the national interest being subordinated to the narrow of self-interest of the most profoundly morally challenged.

But maybe I've misunderstood his drift all together. It's pretty opaque.

[izzybeans]

9. It's all a bunch of nonsense. He takes valid grievances and trivializes them

by conflating theivery with socialism.

[GeorgeGist]

10. Ah for the grand old days ...

of anti-socialism.