I believe this totally explains our economy

[Mr Rabble]

This is from a talk given in 1996. It obliterates every myth that we are currently being fed about our economy. Is it about time that we pay closer attention to what this man is saying?




"For those who are interested in the real world, a look at the actual history suggests some adjustment -- a modification of free market theory, to what we might call "really existing free market theory." That is, the one that's actually applied, not talked about.

And the principle of really existing free market theory is: free markets are fine for you, but not for me. That's, again, near a universal. So you -- whoever you may be -- you have to learn responsibility, and be subjected to market discipline, it's good for your character, it's tough love, and so on, and so forth. But me, I need the nanny State, to protect me from market discipline, so that I'll be able to rant and rave about the marvels of the free market, while I'm getting properly subsidized and defended by everyone else, through the nanny State. And also, this has to be risk-free. So I'm perfectly willing to make profits, but I don't want to take risks. If anything goes wrong, you bail me out.

So, if Third World debt gets out of control, you socialize it. It's not the problem of the banks that made the money. When the S&Ls collapse, you know, same thing. The public bails them out. When American investment firms get into trouble because the Mexican bubble bursts, you bail out Goldman Sachs. And -- the latest Mexico bail out, and on and on. I mean, there's case after case of this.

In fact of the leading -- top -- hundred leading transnationals in the Fortune list of transnationals -- there was a recent study of how they -- how they related to the States in which they- they're all somewhere, you know, so they're all mostly here -- in some National State, it turns out that all hundred of them had benefited from industrial policies, meaning, State intervention in their behalf. All hundred had benefited from the State in which they're based. And twenty of the hundred had been saved from total disaster, that is, collapse, by just State bail-out. When people talk about globalization of the economy, remember that the nanny State has to be very powerful in order to bail out the rich. And nothing is changing in that regard. Twenty out of a hundred, again, were saved from collapse by this, including a number here. "

http://chomsky.info/talks/19960413.htm

[Mr Rabble]

1. Is this going to sink like a stone?

"Well, that's really existing free market theory. There are many examples of it quite close to home. So, we could start with our own Governor, Governor Weld, who is described by the Boston Globe as a libertarian with a religious belief in free markets. And then a couple of days later, they reported that through various scams he had- his administration was able to sharply increase Federal subsidies to Massachusetts, so that- way beyond what they were before, so that he could parade as a fiscal conservative. And that's pretty common.

Just the year before, you may recall, if you have long memories, they had to close Georges Bank -- the richest fishing area in the world -- because it was being overfished, thanks to a combination of deregulation and subsidies to the fishing industry, which have that odd consequence that you tend to get overfishing. So it looked as if the ground fish were wiped out, and they had to close it off. It didn't take long for the religious libertarian fanatic, William Weld, to take the next jet plane down to Washington, hat in hand, asking for a Federal bail-out. They wanted the Federal government to declare it a natural disaster. And the reason was, as he explained, with, presumably, some scientists in tow, that there was some strange kind of predatory fish which no one had yet found, but they would find it, don't worry. So some kind of predatory fish had come and, sort of, wiped out all the, you know, the Cod and the Haddock, and all those things. So it was a natural disaster, and therefore the general public had to, sort of, pay off the results of deregulation and subsidizing the fishing industry. Well, that's the way to be a libertarian with religious fervor.

Another one is the leader of the conservative revolution, Newt Gingrich. Nobody is more passionate about the market than he is, in particular about what he -- his own district, which he calls a Norman Rockwell world of jet planes and fiber optics, as indeed it is. Except, if you ask where jet planes and fiber-optics came from, you discover that the public paid for them, and still pays for them. And in fact he manages to get more Federal subsidies for his district than any suburban county in the country outside the Federal system. So, you can have conservatism flowering among the malls, and so on.

Or you can go back to the Reaganites, who were also very passionate about free markets for everyone else. Meanwhile, they boasted to the American business community, correctly, that they had done more- that they had instituted more protection than any post-war American administration, in fact, more than all of them combined. They had doubled import restrictions, blocking- and helped -- and poured public funds into major industries to enable them to recapitalize, to protect the -- in fact reconstruct, the steel industry, and the automotive industry, and semiconductors, and so on, which would have disappeared if they had opened the markets."

[BrklynLiberal]

2. Noam Chomsky!!!!!!

They don't want to know the facts that he tells them. They are only interested in making as much $ as they can as soon as they can...Greed!!!

[Mr Rabble]

4. It would seem so. My issue is this-

This guy has been uncannily accurate about American society and foreign policy for at least the last 40 years.

And yet even here @ DU, his work goes largely ignored. He will even be occasionally ridiculed about a falsehood or something. It's sad.

[BrklynLiberal]

7. I guess it might be called the "Cassandra Phenomenon"

Truthtellers and forecasters who are accurate, yet people refuse to pay attention to them.

[Mr Rabble]

8. The good professor has a great quote about this topic-

"The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert."

And so it goes.

All the while the Tom Friedmans and Bill Kristols of the world are on TV every night...

[BrklynLiberal]

9. Absolutely true..and so it was throughout history.

[Stardust]

6. I remember Mother Teresa said Greed was the primary cause of mankind's misery. I

cannot find the exact quote but I tend to trust her assessment as she knew misery up close and personal.

Chomsky is a national treasure.

K&R

[DJ13]

3. Well that theory works on small third world countries one at a time

But Im not sure it works in the industrialized countries, and all of them at once.

Theres no healthy countries left to underwrite the needed funds on a large scale.

[Mr Rabble]

5. Not sure I understand your point.

Can you explain what you mean here please?