I commend Arthur Brooks for going on a liberal talk show knowing for sure that he is going to get a debate (although i won't be happy until he goes on Real Time with Bill Maher). Brooks, however, seems to be under the impression that every liberal is automatically Michael Moore. I will admit that Moore's movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, was itself hostile to capitalism and free enterprise as an ideology and system; however, most people, even among those (like myself) that agreed with some of what Moore was saying, will admit that we don't want to get rid of capitalism in the United States anytime soon or ever. We're not naive, young socialists as these free marketeers want to paint us, and I would also argue that Obama himself isn't a socialist either. What we want is for the government to be able to protect the entrepreneurship of small business owners from the predation of Big Business (which, admittedly, from any modern liberal's perspective is much more dangerous sounding than Big Government).
Brooks did make some interesting comments in his interview that I would like to mention. He mentioned that there is no such thing as a totally free market system in a real world situation and that the government does have the job of protecting citizens from such things as oil spills and corporate corruption and predation. This would mean that, if i understand Arthur Brooks correctly, he does support "regulation," (which i previously assumed was anathema to these free enterprise think tankers). What he said he was against, for instance, was bank bailouts by the government - in other words, he is against the same thing that Michael Moore and many other hardcore liberals were against ...Wait, what?
Okay - so Brooks was against corporate welfarism. But then again, who isn't against corporate welfarism? And where exactly does Brooks lie on our lovely political spectrum? There is something that must be gotten straight. Who were for and who were against the bail outs of wall street banks? The extreme LEFT and RIGHT were both against bailouts, before and after they became part of President Obama's early program. Just ask Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul what they think of the bailouts. Chances are you will not get very favorable responses.
Now, i'm very confused because this doesn't seem to be a matter of what party you are from anymore. The bank bailouts were proposed at first by a Republican administration (President Bush, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke) and then were taken on and passed by a Democratic Legislature (Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd, to name a few). I don't believe there was any ideology at work here other than perhaps ruthlessly centrist pragmatism. Sure it was unfair corporate welfarism; however, it was particularly necessary when one considers the facts: these were the biggest financial institutions in America and a systematic failure of each would have caused the potential collapse of the world economy (the ensuing failure would make our "Great Recession," look like a blip on the screen in our economic history).
So Arthur Brooks is basically saying that we would have been better off had we let some of the biggest financial institutions in the world collapse and liquidate themselves. Hey, he might be right in the very very distant long run (it's always good to shake things up), but I guess the government decided it wasn't willing to allow the nuclear annihilation of our economy. So they did what they were told (by just about all economists) was the right thing to do in the circumstances. Ideology be damned! That, to me, doesn't show that government wants to take over the economy in some kind of American form of European Socialism, which Brooks seems to be arguing in his book and in the interview.
If Brooks isn't against regulation of corporations and isn't against private-sector unions (which i also assumed he would be against), what is it exactly that he is against and what exactly is he proposing that Obama is doing to our nation that is changing our culture so much?
Brooks commented on The Daily Show about a war of cultures between the 30% of those in the nation that are open to "socialism," and the 70% that have a cultural attachment to our free enterprise system. The problem that i face (and i might not have such a problem if I read Brook's book, which I intend to do) is that I don't know what socialism means to him. For instance, I'm sure only the radical lefty fringe (which is VERY limited in this country) actually wants to get rid of private ownership. I come from a total lefty-liberal perspective and definitely frown upon ridding America of private ownership and private enterprise. Most liberals in this country don't see their form of "socialism" as some statist system that looks to Stalin and Mao for inspiration - as badly as Tea Partiers may want to believe it.
We experience "socialism" everyday: the elderly love their medicare, veterans have the VA, and i'm absolutely sure that, as dysfunctional as they can be, nobody would argue that the nation would be better off without public schools. Just the idea of having a "public sector," could be considered socialist by some... but it really isn't. In reality, real SOCIALISM is a system in which the government (or "the people") control the means of production. That is not the case in America and it never will be, regardless of which party takes control.
No comments:
Post a Comment