Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.
I have been watching Clint Eastwood films lately and thinking about his role in fueling the belittlement of government. In Dirty Harry, for example, the Eastwood character is a loner who stands up to lily-livered bureaucrats who lack the cojones to do what needs to be done and to morally corrupt politicians who cave in to bad guys for a living. This kind of film was part of a sustained, and dazzlingly effective, cultural agenda to discredit government.
A key mechanism of enforcing this view is the snarl -- it's not really an argument -- that having the government undertake any given task is... socialism.
For thirty years, Democrats have lacked a cogent response. In the debate over health care, they tried to counter the socialism charge by designing reform according to Republican principles: no to single payer, no to the public option, yes to private health insurance (an industry so inefficient that Americans spend one third of their health care dollars on paperwork, but I digress).
Democrats are left still facing sneers of socialism. Trying to counter this charge by messing around with policy design details is a strategy fated to fail. What we need instead is a way of reframing the debate that begins to reverse the discrediting of government.
The financial crisis presented a golden, largely squandered, opportunity to begin this process. No better time than the present. Americans recently heard reports of bank profits so high that major banks are declaring dividends. This presents a teachable moment to send a much more effective message than Obama's old fashioned populism that demonizes bankers as "fat cats."
Here's a fresh response: What conservatives are proposing is to privatize the upside of the economy while socializing the downside.
Take the banks. Back during the Great Recession, they were only too happy to socialize risk. But now, with profits aplenty, banks have lost interest in sharing. After we socialized the downside risk, now they want to privatize the upside risk.
This doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense. But it's a consistent theme in Republican proposals. Take the new Republican health care proposal. It wants to preserve for private industry the right to insure relatively healthy people off whom insurers can make a profit. Again, Republicans want to privatize the upside and let industry keep those profits, and socialize the downside -- and then deride government for needing to levy taxes to cover the costs of shouldering that risk.
A similar dynamic is at work at the local level. A recent California ballot initiative makes it more difficult for local governments to impose fees on developers as a condition of approving development. The fees required the developers to pay for the costs of the water, sewers, schools, and parks that would serve the new subdivisions. Not surprisingly, the developers hate fees because they prefer to socialize the costs of infrastructure and privatize the profits of development.
So here's the message: The next time Republicans snarl "socialism," Democrats need to re-examine the baseline assumptions. Often you'll find a proposal to privatize profits and socialize risk. Calling that out is the first step towards changing Americans' negativism towards government.
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Election reform that eliminates the inherent conflicts of interest that pit the interesst of the people of this nation against the corporate lobbies and thier attended interests is the first step towards correcting this practice. (((Fix Congress First)))
On the one hand are those who have become disenchanted with the current system and on the other are those who've misattributed the problems to the free market. Expansion of government interests needs to balance and defend the legitmate systems of profit and private property. But Americans need understand how it is that the recent expansion of Medicare has been both the greatest augmentaton of the American welfare state and a giveaway to large pharmaceutical corporations.
Partisan politics does nothing to help our nation understand the inherent trade-offs. The dumbing down of the debate is insulting, dishonest or clearly not understood. Most likely the later as evidenced by uneducated claims and statements from the politico likes of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and other's regurgitating self promotional nonsense.
A summary review of Corporatism and Socialism in America would reveal that in more recent years, corporate interests have often cheered on big government programs.
Privatize the profits and socialize the losses is what is at the heart of our housing finance approach since the New Deal. Nothing new here.
Privatize the profits and socialize the losses is also the neo-liberal economics being imposed on foreign countries: it's one of the complaints of the Egyptians (just one example).
Reforming the current lobbyist written "Free Trade" agenda somehow morphed into additional Nafta-style trade agreements with Korea and Columbia.
And let us not forget the two ongoing, treasury draining, wars of choice (fought exclusively by the lower class, benefiting exclusively Haliburton, Blackwater and other "defense" conglomorates).
Social security "reform"? Of course, decrease benefits and raise the retirement age. Raising the regressive CAP is not even open for discussion.
Dems & Repubs pretend to disagree on immigration, gay rights, abortion etc. (they don't) while allowing NOTHING to impact the real agenda of the multinational corporations by whom they're wholly owned.
GO PACK GO!!!
GO PACK GO!!!
GO PACK GO!!!
I like the idea behind this - it's one of the first, good responses to the conservative charge of "SOCIALISM!" with anything and everything the government does. But I think it needs to be a tad more emotionally charged - to both encourage liberals to really get fired up about it, and also to put conservatives on the defensive more.
Something along the lines of "Conservatives want to privatize their greed, and socialize their losing bets" or similar. Make it emotionally appealing to liberals/progressives, yet push the buttons of financial conservatives while making social conservatives squirm at the religious applications.
I'm not saying my interpretation is the best language, but with a tweak or two, it could become a powerful counter-narrative. Kudos.
The rich get the profits and everyone else gets the losses.
I heard someone say at the beginning of the great recession, "it's capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down". Lets hammer the GOP with that a million times a day til the end of time.
If Republicans were ever forced to explain how their policies benefit the public, they would look and sound like fools.
Both parties will continue to participate in privatizing profits and socializing losses because they get paid to do it - through financial contributions, job offers, you name it.
Fixed it for you. And both parties/ideologies actively support this model if they are on the receiving end of the profitability. The debate is merely which industry sector should receive the greater largesse.
Because - again assuming your premises were valid, which they are not - it would still only mean that republicans are self-contradictory while democrats would be having potentially naive hopes.
And if there's one thing that's certain, then it is that entering the political realm with self-contradictory views cannot be healthy. In fact, it cannot even be conducive to mental health. It undermines mental health. Because it's unhealthy to argue with foolishness. The only thing you can do with foolishness is to point out that it's there. And then step away. Which is precisely why political discourse in the US has deteriorated. It's simple. It's called well poisoning. It always works. But it's about time people realize that it's not frowned upon because it might not work. It's frowned upon because it does.