Donald
Trump’s economic advisers released a bizarre report attacking
socialism yesterday. Socialists can only take one lesson from it:
we’re winning.
by
Miles Kampf-Lassin
Part
2 - The Ghost of Thatcher
The
report frames its critique of socialism by quoting former UK prime
minister Margaret Thatcher’s oft-cited claim that “Socialist
governments … always run out of other people’s money,” and
thus the way to prosperity is for the state to give “the people
more choice to spend their own money in their own way.”
It’s
appropriate that the authors take the Iron Lady’s words as gospel,
since she was similarly distressed by “creeping socialism” and
used her time in power to push neoliberal economic policies of
deregulation, privatization, and austerity coupled with attacks on
voting rights and organized labor.
The
ruthless ideology grounding Thatcher’s market-centric economic
philosophy, “monetarism,” was revealed by Alan Budd, one of her
economic advisers, in 1992 when he called monetarism “a very,
very good way to raise unemployment and raising unemployment was an
extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working
classes. So what was engineered there, in Marxist terms, was a crisis
of capitalism which recreated a reserve army of labor and has allowed
the capitalist to make high profits ever since.”
Such
high profits for the super rich are the type of benchmarks the CEA
sets for judging economic success. Throughout the report, the authors
consistently use “growth” as a marker for how capitalist
economies are able to outperform socialist ones. (Never mind that a
full 95 percent of income gains in the growth years following the
Great Recession — from 2009 to 2013 — went to the top 1 percent.)
Inequality
levels in the United States continue to rival those of the Gilded
Age, while the racial wealth gap grows ever larger and millions of
Americans go without adequate access to housing, education, health
care, and other basic needs.
But
these are not the concerns of the CEA analysts. Instead, they employ
a series of absurd Friedmanite graphs, odd references to discarded
Christmas sweaters as representations of mixed value (“the
recipients of Christmas gifts sometimes value the gifts less than
they cost the giver, as exemplified by Christmas sweaters that are
never taken out of the closet to be worn”), and strange claims
that “owning and operating a pickup truck costs the average
worker in a Nordic country substantially more than it costs the
average American worker” to prove that capitalism must be the
only system capable of ushering in true “economic freedom.”
At no
point, however, does the report address the fact that the kind of
“economic freedom” the report’s authors are championing is
incompatible with a profit-driven order that systematically deprives
large swaths of the population of the freedom to live in an
affordable home, be taught in a fully funded school, and access
lifesaving medical care without breaking the bank.
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