America the Banana Republic ---- so says Christopher Hitchens

[quantyst]

America the Banana Republic: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

 

[bigbadwolf]

From Hitchens' article:

"socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest."

This is what I've been saying.

I have heard arguments about whether it was Milton Friedman or Gore Vidal who first came up with this apt summary of a collusion between the overweening state and certain favored monopolistic concerns, whereby the profits can be privatized and the debts conveniently socialized, but another term for the same system would be "banana republic."

Amen. But I doubt whether either of these gents came up with the idea. There's a rich vein of left-wing thought that has examined this: Poulantzas, and Baran and Sweezy, among others.

 

[charlesdwright]

You're invited to make the marketplace better.

 

[bigbadwolf]

You're invited to make the marketplace better.

The abstraction called "The market" has never existed in pure form and can exist only in the deranged rubbish of Ayn Rand. What we're seeing is what's happened in previous capitalist crises: an overt shift to fascism, as autocratic state power is used to solve capitalism's inherent contradictions. This is the significance of the bailout package. Which reminds me: I found a good article, an excerpt of which is below:

Dissident Voice : Capitalism Without Rules

The appeal of capitalism exists largely in its making acceptable the concentration of wealth and in its religion-like faith in a common, generally negative human attribute as a positive guiding principle: human greed. Capitalism is a social and economic design that gives great freedom to the most greedy. Greed and wealth concentration are intellectually supported under the argument that the invisible hand of greed will design the best possible distribution of wealth based on the most efficient use of resources. And it denies that humans have the power, or should have the power, to control wealth and resources.

This 'leave it to the market' argument overtly suggests that we should not trust other people to control the process of wealth distribution while hiding the fact that the very most acquisitive and ruthless of us are doing exactly that under the cover of 'the market.' Trillions of dollars of wealth have been taken by the tax and credit system over the last 8 years (and for many years before) and "redistributed" to the economic elite, a polite term for the greedy sociopaths at the core of these economic actions. This is being done primarily with war, the healthcare (sic) system and the credit system.

The "bailout" of Wall Street is not a bailout at all. Embezzling is slow. To get big bucks in a hurry requires a robbery and a robbery requires the hold-up note. All the planning can be done in secret, but with a robbery there comes the moment when intentions must be made clear: "Fill this bag. I have a gun in my pocket." We have just been through such a moment, with the note written in all capitalism, so most people missed its true meaning.

"Fill this bag. If you don't your lives will be ruined and children's lives will be ruined
." In capitalism the note reads: "The Market has been damaged by excessive attempts of foolish people to regulate it and so trillions of dollars must be given to the managers who are guided by the True Invisible Hand to save us from a great depression, social unrest and civil war."

What this boils down to is that capitalism, as an economic process, seeks to remove the rules that guide economic behavior, and as economic capitalism melds into political capitalism, what ever form of governance was in place is replaced with fascism. This has been the major movement of historical process in competition with democratization. Global corporations have championed democracy as a way to gain deep power in government, to take control of taxation, reduce political restraints from popular autocrats and manipulate political process.

 

[doug reich]

Has there been a grand awakening among people who formerly had no interest in markets (and all of whom have been quoted by bbb)? Or is this a lot of jumping on the bandwagon to denounce the perceived cause of modern problems? I can't claim to be well-read (or at all read) on the work of Hitchens, but I don't think he's known for his encyclopedic knowledge of market function.

"Markets" are neither an abstraction nor a machination; they are a reality of the way in which people interact.

 

[bigbadwolf]

Has there been a grand awakening among people who formerly had no interest in markets (and all of whom have been quoted by bbb)? Or is this a lot of jumping on the bandwagon to denounce the perceived cause of modern problems? I can't claim to be well-read (or at all read) on the work of Hitchens, but I don't think he's known for his encyclopedic knowledge of market function.

"Markets" are neither an abstraction nor a machination; they are a reality of the way in which people interact.

You are right about Hitchens. But not about some of the others, who have been writing on the subject for years. Unfortunately their opinions and ideas lie outside the pale of academic orthodoxy, so many people tend not to hear about them.

If by "market" you mean places where people meet and exchange vegetables and fruits, wool, livestock and fish, these have existed for millennia. But these are a far cry from the reified notion employed by contemporary economists. The economists add on all sorts of extra assumptions about "the market" so as to allow the construction of theories about human economic behavior. Capitalists and their political stooges then use the pretext of these artificial theories to argue for "deregulation" and "laissez-faire." All fine so far -- but then why do these same scoundrels run to the state and use its power to tax, to distribute largesse, and so on, when their own well-being is threatened? When individuals lose their jobs and their houses, they are told this is the working of the free market in this, the best of all possible worlds. But when Goldman Sachs runs the risk of going belly-up, then by golly, it's "too large to fail," and it could "threaten the whole system" by its demise. In short, the economists' idea of markets has been used to uphold the status quo and promptly jettisoned when it no longer served that purpose. In a way, it's analogous to the way quant models have been misused and abused (as Shreve points out in a recent article) by those in economic and political power.

There is no "free market," no "invisible hand," no "economic forces." What there is is an entrenched plutocracy not bashful about using its political levers to effect its collective will. And making up ad hoc excuses to do this.