Three Questions for Socialists

[IndianaGreen]

Three Questions for Socialists

By John Case
6-26-09, 9:39 am

The bias towards market solutions sits nakedly alongside the stark reality of serious market failures in critical sectors of the economic regime of the past 70 years: health care, financial services, auto, infrastructure, education, climate change preparation, and energy. The difficult challenges before the American people all mandate a sharp turn from the status quo. And that turn simply cannot avoid a substantial expansion of long-term public intervention commensurate with the scale of market failures. Even without the stubborn and unrelenting resistance of finance capital, the insurance and pharma industries, the bondholders of the auto industry, the oil and power industries, and other sundry so-called free market "fundamentalists" these challenges would be daunting. But working people and progressive forces, including important forces aligned with the Obama administration MUST mobilize sufficient, indeed overwhelming, pressure to defeat the resistance, pass the reforms, enforce them, and – most important of all – insure that they redress the massive losses in income and security that have been suffered in the past 30 years.

The right calls this creeping socialism. They are correct – that's exactly what the minimum necessary social democratic reforms are, and there is no point in concealing it. However, contrary to the alarmist hysterics of the ultra right, incremental steps in a socialist direction do NOT mean the end of capitalism. Far from it – universal not-for-profit health care, a green national energy and infrastructure policy, financial reform, very large investments in education and training will generate a new birth of capitalism in many areas of the economy. Innovation is vital to growth and human progress. Healthy, competitive markets play a critical role enabling science and technology to raise human productivity. In addition, with rising culture, human needs and wants – reflected in the DEMAND side of the economy – rise dramatically. Soon almost all industry will be "high-tech" industry, just as every science is now also part computer science. But insuring that the fruits of science and technology really meet human needs and advancement must be tested repeatedly in the furnace of actual economic demand. Markets are the only tools known for performing this task more or less spontaneously on a massive scale – and it is critical that they thrive. Markets are human institutions that will persist as long as there are commodities and a division of labor in society. They are not products of natural law. They can and must be managed to serve human ends. Relieved of the crushing burdens of private health care, able to draw on a more skilled and educated labor force, provided with customers who have rising incomes and needs, given access to stable credit markets – corporations and entrepreneurs will find a new boom in economic activity once the bankrupt vultures and dinosaurs of the last century are give a proper burial.

There are some – thankfully a declining number – on the Left who have long been infected with a caricature of socialism, and capitalism. They see capitalism as a fixed and unchanging system where efforts at reform are inherently futile – forward progress will inevitably be crushed, impoverishment is ultimately absolute, and only a "revolutionary" transformation is capable of liberating working people from exploitation. Likewise socialism is pictured in no less idealized terms with virtually no connection to day to day struggles other than an opportunity to "expose" the "fraud" of reforms. For most of the past century working people in advanced capitalist countries have been ill-served by these tendencies, and in fact largely ignored them with the result that many are seriously marginalized. Despite the romanticized affections some in the marginalized left express for revolutionary movements against colonial and neo-colonial domination in the developing world, these movements, even when compelled to resort to arms in the absence of even minimal democratic rights, have actually been in the lead shunning dogma and devising radical innovations in mixed economic development. These efforts have produced unprecedented growth rates and been the primary cause of the reduction in world poverty rates in the past half-century.

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/8712/

[troubledamerican]

1. The Interstate Freeway System, bedrock of U.S. economy, is pure socialism.

So let's get rid of it, and see what happens to U.S. capitalism.

[Demeter]

2. It Was a Military Solution to a Non-Existent Problem

General Eisenhower, back from WWII in Europe and inaugurated into the White House, looked at America's roads, compared to the AutoBahns in Germany, built in the 1920s and fully exploited by Hitler's conquering armies.

Eisenhower saw this as a deficit on our part, and started the Interstate building program. Since we haven't been invaded, nor needed to move large military convoys since the Civil War, people put them to more civil uses. I am not convinced Eisenhower did this on purpose, or if he regretted it as much as he did the Military Industrial Complex.

[troubledamerican]

3. The military is socialist too. And FDR is prologue to the Freeways.

Quote:

The story of the Interstate often begins with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. FDR summoned
the Chief of the Bureau of Public Roads, Thomas MacDonald, to the White House and drew
on a map his vision for a cross-country high level road system and asked for an evaluation.
The result was the 1939 report, Toll Roads and Free Roads, which can be said to have
initiated the drive for an Interstate System.

WW II intervened and during the war, Roosevelt called for a second report as part of planning
for recovery efforts. That 1943 report, Interregional Highways, is credited by many as the
most important document in the history of America’s highways. It took the original Roosevelt
map, tested several system lengths, and recommended a network of about 26,900 miles.
During the late 1940s the network was mapped, but it took until the Eisenhower years to get
serious about the system. After reports by several Commissions and extensive
Congressional debate, the 1956 Highway Act was passed.

http://74.6.146.127/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=interstate+freeway+system+FDR&fr=yfp-t-501&u=www.interstate50th.org/docs/techmemo1.pdf&w=interstate+freeway+freeways+system+fdr&d=LS6Y3BlMS4fF&icp=1&.intl=us

[MicaelS]

9. IMO, the biggest impetus for the Interstate System in Eisenhower's mind

Was his experience as an observer with the Transcontinental Motor Convoys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_Motor_Convoy

The first one took 62 days to go coast to coast. The second one took 111 days. That's right 62 and 111 days.

This coupled with what Germany had accomplished with the Autobahns sealed the need for a nationwide highway system.

[starroute]

4. "Markets" are not the same as capitalism

There are some good points in this piece -- but it seems to have the fatal defect of confusing free markets with capitalism.

Markets can be an excellent mechanism for allocating supply and demand -- but it is all too easy to rig the game. Corporations can artificially limit supply to increases prices or pump up demand to sell useless products. Monopolies can control sales and prices with even less effort.

Corporations also have a hundred other tricks to get out from under the imperatives of the market. They exploit workers, cheat consumers, blackmail local communities, and despoil the environment -- constantly taking without giving back. They have their fingers in everything from the media to the courts to make sure that they will never be held accountable and will always be able to continue to rig the system.

The real issue of socialism, as far as I can tell, is not whether you want to have the federal government run your local corner grocery but how to break the power of the corporations. I'm not convinced socialism is the best way to do that -- government is a good regulator, but it's not an ideal provider of goods and services -- but it's a good starting point for thinking about the problem.

Fundamentally, I think we have to break the power of capital itself -- to have a society in which there are certain things money cannot buy (elections, for starters) and in which the lack of money cannot be a barrier to either fulfilling essential human needs or participating in the political process.

Once we decide what our objectives are, we can then start to design a method for getting to that end point.

[Demeter]

5. I Agree--and that Means You Are a Total Idealist, Too

Nice to know I'm not alone.

[starroute]

6. Gee, and I thought I was a hard-headed pragmatist

When a piece of machinery isn't working for you, you break it down into its component parts, figure out where the problem is, and rebuild it so that it works.

Our economy is a broke-down machine -- one that has ceased to perform most of its original functions and belches black smoke as it grinds its way down the road -- and we need to get ruthlessly pragmatic on its ass.

The idealists are the ones who insist that if we just let it keep going as it is, things will miraculously turn around and it'll all be daisies and blue skies.

I guess my slogan at this point is, "Yes, it's broke, damn it. Now can we fix it?"

[Demeter]

7. Yes, But Obama Is NOT an Engineer

Nor has he hired any technically trained people. these bozos couldn't recognize a model if it bit them, nor reason to a logical conclusion.

But the biggest problem is: he hired all the foxes to guard the chicken coop they emptied.

[BridgeTheGap]

8. Creeping socialism or lurching fascism - pick one. n.t