Last week Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent picked up on a blogpost from Democracy editor Michael Tomasky about how liberals should be touting the merits of "government." That is a great idea, if the point is to advance the conservatives' agenda.
It is astounding how happy liberals are to work for the right by implying that conservatives somehow just want to leave markets to themselves whereas the liberals want to bring in the pointy-headed bureaucrats to tell people what they should do. This view is, of course, nonsense. Pick an issue, any issue, and you will almost invariably find the right actively pushing for a big role for government.
However, for conservatives the goal is not ensuring a decent standard of living for the bulk of the population. Rather the goal is ensuring that money is redistributed upward. And, of course, the conservatives are smart enough not to own up to their use of the government.
Just to take a few easy ones, why would any market-oriented opponent of big government support the existence of too-big-to-fail banks (TBTF)? These TBTF banks operate with an implicit subsidy from the government. Lenders expect the government to step in to back up these banks debt if they fail, as happened on a massive basis in 2008. As a result, TBTF banks can borrow money at lower interest rates than would be possible in a free market.
The amount of money at stake is substantial, possibly more than $60 billion a year. This is more money than is at issue with the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy. This $60 billion is money that is redistributed from the rest of us to the biggest banks in the country, their top executives and their shareholders, all courtesy of big government.
To take another easy example, drug patents raise the price of prescription drugs by close to $270 billion a year above their free market price. This is roughly five Bush tax cuts to the wealthy.
Patents are government-granted monopolies. Since prescription drugs often are necessary for a person's health or even life, people will pay almost anything for a drug if they can afford it or can get their insurance to pick up the tab.
Patents imply very big government since the government will imprison anyone who produces a drug without the patent holder's consent. In recent years the big government has been actively working to extend Pfizer and Merck's patent monopolies to the rest of the world through NAFTA, CAFTA and other recent trade deals.
Patents are currently used as a mechanism to finance prescription drug research. But there are other more efficient mechanisms, such as the prize system suggested by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz. Alternatively, we could simply increase and redirect the $30 billion in public money that goes to support biomedical research each year through the National Institutes of Health.
To take one other example of big government that conservatives support, highly paid professionals (e.g. doctors, dentists and lawyers) use licensing restrictions to limit both foreign and domestic competition. While the government has been using the banner of "free trade" to drive down the wages of manufacturing workers, it has simultaneously been increasing the protection afforded doctors in order to prevent any similar downward pressure on their wages.
If doctors in the United States were paid the same as doctors in Western Europe, it would save us more than $80 billion a year. The big government subsidy to doctors alone is close to two times the money involved in Bush's tax cuts to the wealthy.
It is not difficult to find other examples where conservatives want a big role for the government. Of course conservatives are opposed to big government social programs. That is because their goal is redistributed income upward rather than ensuring a decent standard of living for the whole population. It's very good politics for the right to equate big government with big government social programs, and incredibly foolish for progressives to help them.
The issue here is not in any real sense the size of government or its impact on the economy. A government that diverts an extra $270 billion a year to the pharmaceutical industry by enforcing patent monopolies on prescription drugs is every bit as "big" as a government that taxes an additional $270 billion a year and hands it to the drug industry.
It is totally understandable that the right would try to conceal the massive extent to which it relies on government to redistribute income upward. It is very hard to figure out why the country's leading progressive thinkers want to help them.
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http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/
Lier.
This free market ho_g_washh is just that.
First of all--American pharma does NOT invent new drugs. They just repackage and repatent old ones. Notify me the next time they cure cancer.
Second, the logic of freemarket is AGAINST curing anything. What Big Pharma wants is endless treatments, not once and done cures. And they admit it. Straight out.
Third, pharma companies still invent new products, just as fast, when they make fair, moderate profits, as they do when they gouge, like they do now. That is the painful truth about the freemarket. It works better when it is heavily regulated. And it continues to work heavily regulated. But you brndd ideologues are incapable of understanding such subtleties.
Fourth, you want scientists to invent something good? You don't need no stnkng freemarkets. Just offer a reward. Have the government offer a reward. You will get results infinitely faster than you will waiting for the "free market" (which doesn't exist, because it is fixed) to "work." Because scientists get the dough right up front, without middle-men. Or don't you understand economics?
Consider the Reagan-era to present, $40 billion+, unnecessary, unproven, SDI-spinoff, anti-ballistic missile systems; the $3 billion Bush man-in-the-moondoogle NASA pork; the $3 billion failed Boeing virtual border fence, the billions spent in the many GOP "bridge-to-nowhere" earmark pork projects, etc. Apparently, the GOP hate the poor while they are sycophants to the rich. They just can't stand that somebody they do not like or deem unworthy might receive taxpayer benefits.
The reasoning is that "they will we beat us if we don't join them."
Clinton pioneered seizing positions in line with their orthodoxy, forcing them to join him or betray their own values...i.e. welfare reform, the repeal of Glass-Steagal.
There is a problem...whether knuckling under to avoid looking "soft" on issues or triangulating...
You must first accept the conservative framing. And the core of which is that Reagan is the final word in policy. This framing is the road to ruin.
Why?
Reagan's ideology was a repudiation of everything after Harding, namely the Great Depression, New Deal, the expansion of WW2, the policies of Eisenhower, LBJ's War on Poverty and Great Society Programs .
For Reagan, all history ended with Harding. For all Reaganites, all history began with Reagan.
This is what every liberal agrees to when they work for the Right.
There is nothing said about Harding or Reagan's policies causing stock market crashes, but they do...as in '29, '87, and in '08. Clinton's repealing of Glass/Steagal made it worse.
The Great Depression taught us everything we needed to know about what to do in a crisis like ours...but not if you believe Reagan and Harding.
I'd like progressives to start talking about our tax code and how it needs to be rewritten. That's a conversation that always gets the right wing very defensive.
both the gov and private business have good sides and bad sides. all economies on earth are a mix of private and public sector.
the trick is to dig into the complexity and try to make the best of both and avoid the worst of both.
As an example look at the repeal of Glass Steagall Act, Did the American people demand it? No! Wall St. wanted it and paid for it.. We all know what happened next!
Governments, have a solid history worldwide of pretty much doing everything poorly except instituting enforcing their own laws. From Plato to Julius Caesar to Obama. Now these laws are manipulated to serve religious idealism as well as beneficial to industries and governments themselves. We serve them, when they should serve us. Laws created and defended Slavery, the Holocaust and virtually every war and genocide.
Today, it's money. I was taught by the Catholic Church that it was the root of all Evil? The reason they taught it, shows how easily the Vatican became the wealthiest entity of an indeterminable / incalculable sum. Just compare the US GDP/CEO Salaries with the average US salary/income and simply compare the two over 200 years, and you have proof of who works for who.