Will Wilkinson has a smart, if libertarian-tinged, take on Peter Orszag’s Citimoney, that I haven’t seen it anywhere else:
We are constantly exploited by the tools meant to foil our exploitation. For a progressive to acknowledge as much is tantamount to abandoning progressivism. So it’s no surprise that progressives would rather worry over trivialities such as campaign finance reform than dwell on the paradoxes of political power. But it really isn’t the Citizens United decision that’s about to make Peter Orszag a minor Midas. It’s the vast power of a handful of Washington players, with whom Mr Orszag has become relatively intimate, to make or destroy great fortunes more or less at whim. Well-connected wonks can get rich on Wall Street only because Washington power is now so unconstrained. Washington is so unconstrained in no small part because progressives and New Dealers and Keynesians and neo-cons and neo-liberals for various good and bad reasons wanted it that way. So, what is to be done? Summon a self-bottling genie-bottling genie?
[….]The classically liberal answer is to make government less powerful.
[…..]So what is to be done about the structural injustice spotlighted by Peter Orszag’s passage through the revolving golden door? How exactly do we tweak the unjust structure? If the system is rigged, how exactly do we unrig it? In which direction can we muddle without making matters worse?
This goes straight to the heart of a matter, but I also think this is far too reductionist. First off, given Orszag’s talents, his actual work may well be worth a lot of money to Citi — he ran a fantastic OMB. Harold Ford is a much more troubling case — he sure as shit wasn’t getting a million Ameros a year to oversee the crunching of numbers.
Nevertheless, the appearance of de facto bribery here is extremely troubling. Even more troubling is the fact that by making all political elites wealthy, the corporatocracy can ensure that political leaders will identify with the rich.
But the most important thing is whether or not the bribee did the bidding of his bribers while he was working for the federal government. I don’t see evidence that Orszag did (his recent columns are another story), I do see evidence that Harold Ford did (bankruptcy bill). That is part of why I would never vote for Harold Ford for anything, not even in a general election (I’d rather see Orszag stay away from government work too, at this point). And that’s how democracy is supposed to work — we don’t vote for people if we don’t like their record.
As much as the post-government pay-outs disturb me, Citizens United bothers me more, because it directly affects our ability to have real elections. Government officials will always be bribed, in an any system, and while every effort should be made to prevent and condemn this bribery, I don’t think throwing up your hands and saying “this is why the government shouldn’t have any power” is the solution. Remember: corporatocrats can bribe each other too.
Martin
We only have this problem because public employees are paid too much.
eyelessgame
In the same way that “there will always be ways for people to hurt each other with technology” does not mean “we should therefore avoid technology”.
There will always be child porn on the Internet. Therefore there should be no Internet.
Let’s do the refrain One. More. Time. The reason we got into the mess of 2007-???? was that we deregulated.
Free-market zero-regulation libertarians should be laughed out of the public forum now and forevermore.
superking
I’m sure you all will be interested to know that Citi Financial has decided that now is a good time to rebrand itself. From hence forth, it shall be called OneMain Financial. A rose by any other name will smell as sweet. Or, Puffy now goes by Diddy, but he’s still Sean Combs at heart.
Fun times.
Corner Stone
Orszag will be in and out of govt for the rest of his career. Back and forth, with nary a pause as it suits the MoTU.
Zifnab
It’s always the same argument with libertarians.
Rich and influential individuals are corrupting the government to relax regulations, cut special deals, and spare them from oversight. Therefore, if we just get rid of all regulations, cut all funding to all programs, and completely abandon oversight, these rich and influential individuals will no longer have an edge.
It’s a half-truth, because certain businesses DO gain a large advantage from government favoritism. But it’s always the same solution – replace corruption with anarchy – that never bothers weighing the old against the new.
Pillow the pro-anarchist logic with happy talk about how the free market is infallible and 2nd Amendment Remedies are the only effective guardians of liberty, and you’ve got a pretty solid template for every libertarian argument in the last 10 years.
Corner Stone
I just disagree that this is correct.
jwb
@superking: I wonder why they didn’t go with “No Label Financial.” I was just told the other day that all real Murkins want to get beyond labels.
kth
I just don’t see this at all. Being a progressive doesn’t mean you ignore or brush aside agency problems, only that you don’t believe that those costs outweigh the benefits of vigorous government. Presumably Wilkinson’s “solution” is to simply not have an EPA or an FDA.
Chris
In which case… the power of the rich and powerful gets unloaded directly onto the rest of us without going through government channels? Which is better, how?
It’s classical liberalism’s eternal blind spot; the belief that oppression can only come from government, and that if we do away with it somehow we’ll never be oppressed again.
Which is a close cousin to the belief that if we do away with all of the government’s “carrot” programs (welfare state, consumer protection, foreign aid, you name it) and leave it only with the “stick” ones (police, military and judiciary), somehow that’ll take away its temptation to use the sticks and beat people into submission.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I understand his concern, and there probably should be a gap between government employment and private sector employment that has lobbyists, but at the same time, I don’t want to end up with only idiots in Washington because the smart people will only stay in the private sector. A government version of a non-compete clause would be good.
jwb
I don’t know, DougJ. Wilkerson’s point seems like Slate-worthy contrarianism.
Corner Stone
I can’t be assed to read the whole Wilkinson article but this excerpt has my sniffer detecting some bullshit ahead.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Washington, Wall Street, big bankers, brokers, big business and the wealthy are inextricably linked at the wallet. Money talks louder than votes and they have the money to buy any lost votes back though campaigns built on obfuscation. There will be no untangling of this Gordian Knot they have built. Corruption is rampant and pretty much out in the open. There aren’t enough people who care about it to want to do something to stop it.
If this is the best government money can buy then I want a refund.
Chris
Premise: the police is controlled by the mob.
Classic liberal solution: abolish the police.
Modern liberal solution: clean up the police department. Much more easily said than done, but a step up from “oh, this can’t be fixed! Let’s not even try!”
geemoney
Can someone here explain what he means when he says this?
This is a serious question, no snark intended. What did progressives wish for that led to this?
ETA:
@Chris:
Fact: the police is controlled by the mob.
Classic liberal solution: get rid of the police.
Seriously? Or snark?
Hogan
I’m pretty sure there was massive corruption in Washington even before the New Deal. So to which era are we supposed to be going back? The Era of Good Feeling? The Articles of Confederation?
Davis X. Machina
In vulgar libertarianism there is no coercion except state coercion.
The rest is just the workings of free and voluntary associations between equal partners… like the one between me and my homeboy, Wells Fargo Mortgage Company.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@geemoney:
For some reason I think they are serious. This is their second mentioning of liberalism hating government.
Funny though. :)
PeakVT
Washington is so unconstrained in no small part because progressives and New Dealers and Keynesians and neo-cons and neo-liberals for various good and bad reasons wanted it that way.
Oh, bullshit. Progressives and such don’t want an unconstrained government, and have never argued for such a thing. They’ve argued for government involvement in many matters because because of asymmetries between players in private markets, because private markets fail to do a number of things well, and for other reasons along those lines.
Libertards are just as disconnected from reality as the Xtianists. Some days I don’t know which group I should laugh at more.
Davis X. Machina
@Odie Hugh Manatee: They mean, I think, Manchester-School liberalism, not New-Deal liberalism…
The Republic of Stupidity
I just loves me some stereotyping and gratuitous bashing early in the morning…
some other guy
This would make some sense if the corrupt gov’t officials were being bribed to actively abuse their powers, but in this case the “well-connected wonks” are being bribed NOT to use their power, and they deliver in the form of weak-tea financial “reform” legislation, loophole-laden regulations, and toothless regulators.
Getting rid of government oversight powers entirely would get rid of the incentive for the banks to bribe, sure, but it would do nothing to stop the actual bankster abuses of consumers, investors, and of our economy as a whole. All it does is remove the need to pay protection money to keep their rackets unmolested.
As with another poster’s corrupt police analogy above, the answer is not to abolish the power of the government, but to instead to purge it of and insulate it from the corrupting influence.
LikeableInMyOwnWay
The country is run by a Corporatocracy. Let’s take a deep breath and let that sink in. We may hate it, and a few posters here can write 20,000 word rambles about it, but there it is. It is what it is.
So, are we suggesting that we can form governments in this situation without employing people from the corporatocracy, or without government employees going back out into the corporatocracy? That’s ludicrous, is it not?
So that said, what rules and or constraints do think would serve some purpose other than “appearances” of propriety, and how would those rules be established and applied? Is there a plausible scenario for this? I don’t think there is, but I might be persuaded otherwise if someone can develop it and explain it.
Otherwise isn’t this just WATB bullshit? We the people elected governments that established the status quo. What did we think was going to happen? Why bitch about the rather minor effects of it, like people moving to and from government employ from the corporatocracy?
I don’t have much use for “appearances” of goodness. Mostly they are just opportunities for crooks and liars to manipulate the theatrics. With a government full of Tom Delays, what good would a few silly rules about government/corporate employment do? The Delays of the world would just use those rules to further fatten their wallets. I am not worried about the Orszags, the kid strikes me as not being crook material. I am worried about the real crooks, like the ones who would craft the rules.
El Cid
Interesting points from Columbia School of Journalism faculty members — who, interestingly enough, are not Glenn Greenwald — sending a letter to Holder etc. about how the standards being applied to Assange and Manning would likely severely damage the ability of journalists.
If this approach did happen to affect the ability to pursue investigative journalism, this would be a worthwhile sacrifice, because a lot of major news sources get tired of paying the extra money for investigative reporting anyway.
El Cid
Actually, the sponsoring, placement, or promotion post facto of key advisers is one of the major ways that the super-rich control — or at least heavily influence out of proportion — government policy.
PeakVT
@PeakVT: I should have also pointed out that neo-cons and neo-liberals are not progressives.
WyldPirate
Well here is a classic case of the moneyed corporations intimidating the powerless…
Servicers Downgraded Credit Score of Man who Asked for His Note:
You can stick a fork in the US. We’re done. We’re owned lock, stock and barrel by the coorporations.
Soylent Green is people, baby….
Sentient Puddle
Before any more confusion sets in, it would probably be worth it to note that the term “classical liberalism” doesn’t mean liberalism as we know it. It means pre-New Deal liberalism, which more or less translates to modern day libertarianism.
As to why they don’t just say “libertarianism” instead, I guess they just want to sound all academic or something?
LikeableInMyOwnWay
@El Cid:
Maybe, but if you took it away (for which I suggest, above, that there is no plausible scenario), then how long do you think it would take the corporatocratists to replace it with something else?
High powered lobbying seems to be working pretty well for them, for example. Massive infusions of money into the political arena seem to be pretty cost effective. It’s not like a few molemen here and there are the whole game.
It’s a leaky sieve. What good does it do to plug a few openings in the mesh? Doesn’t the whole thing have to be shitcanned? What are the chances of that happening? Without it, what difference is a slower revolving door really going to make?
PS
@Davis X. Machina: The original really is playing with terminology — not just the different versions of “liberal” that you cite but also (I think) the different versions of “progressive” and doing so in a way that either reflects a confused mind or else a clear mind that is attempting to confuse others. Perhaps both, in different sentences. Or at least clauses. Nouns, maybe …
El Cid
@El Cid: Crap. Stupid tab thing in Firefox meant this wrong thread.
sukabi
here’s the thing DougJ, they don’t call it a “revolving door” for nothing… you can bet your last dollar (and by that time it will be your last dollar) that Orszag will return to high government office (future Treas. Sec.) in the future from his lofty perch on Wall Street… why do you think we’re in the mess we’re in…
matt
US is the greatest power in the world’s history. the idea of constraining its government so much that it can’t create fortunes is preposterously stupid.
Observer
Doug, how do you know this?
Are you just repeating “common knowledge” or is there some specific thing you think Orszag did well. Serious question, I’m genuinely interested to know why Orszag gets so much good press.
Nobody really got much press as OMB director before, except, possibly, Josh Bolten but that’s mainly because he became chief of staff to Bush. But nobody then said, gee let’s pay the former OMB director millions to help run a real company.
J.D.
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Hong Kong has something like a non-compete clause for government civil servants:
http://www.csb.gov.hk/english/admin/retirement/188.html
Hong Kong also pegs the salary of the public servants to roughly comparable private sector jobs:
http://www.csb.gov.hk/english/admin/pay/38.html
LikeableInMyOwnWay
@matt:
One of the worst-constructed strawmen I have ever seen.
Good work.
What is actually being discussed here is that we don’t like seeing these big banquets for insiders that we are not invited to … so let’s throw a fit over the seating arrangments.
batgirl
My favorite WW sentence from this piece:
Wonderfully simplified libertarianism bs: Government=always bad and market institutions=always good.
What is missing is that both are institutions made up of humans with all the failings of humanity, including the lust for power. Yet somehow market institutions get a pass. We are told that government, by its nature, is oppressive and exploitative, while market institutions, by their nature, are not (only imagined by progressives).
But in WW’s next sentence:
he points out that market institutions game the system of government for their own ends. Without government, won’t these market institutions still continue to game the system for their own ends? Oh yes, I forget, the magic fairy of market forces will protect of all.
Nutella
I don’t think any progressives wanted Washington power to be unconstrained. Because regulatory capture can and does happen, we should have no regulation at all. That will turn out well, I’m sure.
fasteddie9318
Problem: Wealthy and powerful corporate interests have bought control of the institution that is, in part, supposed to protect those who lack wealth and power from being exploited by the wealthy and powerful. The wealthy and powerful use their purchased leverage to enable them to exploit those who lack wealth and power to a greater degree.
The (g)libertarian solution:
1. Eliminate the institution that is supposed to protect those who lack wealth and power from exploitation at the hands of the wealthy and powerful
2. ???
3. Paradise!
I’d like Will Wilkinson to try a thought experiment, or maybe our in-house critic could give it a stab: let’s say government were eliminated tomorrow. Just gone. POOF! Anarchy reigns supreme. What sort of society do they imagine will take its place? Do they see some sort of anarcho-collaborative institution rising up to counterbalance what the power and money of someone like Lloyd Blankfein can leverage? How would removing government from the equation lead to a more equitable, just, free society? Because I can’t imagine any other outcome aside from people like me being forced by Mr. Blankfein’s private security forces to tongue-bathe his car once a week in exchange for an occasional non-disdainful glance in my direction. Sure, maybe the poor, without government restrictions, would rise up and slay the wealthy, but I’m sure that’s not the outcome Will Wilkinson has in mind.
Craig Pennington
This is fucking bullshit. The problem, as Chris and others have noted, is not that the government is powerful but that it’s not doing its fucking job. The problem is not the powerful FCC, it’s that the FCC is pwned by the goddamned telecom companies that they “regulate.” See also the SEC. And in the legislative branch, see Citizen’s United and in both executive and legislative branches see the revolving door. The problem is corruption. Classic liberalism and free market capitalism require openness and the rule of law. What we have is secrecy and a failure of the rule of law. Fix that.
SiubhanDuinne
All I had to do was see the title and I knew it was one of DougJ’s flashes of utter brilliance. I love the way you can always find just the right quote, or take a familiar phrase and turn it inside out or even just tweak it a little, to make it perfect for the thread. It’s a wonderful gift you have there, DougJ.
Chris
It gets better. When you bring up the abuses of the Gilded Age, if they ever bother to respond, they’ll say that those abuses were committed with the assistance of government, therefore it’s government’s fault, and everything wrong with the Gilded Age = socialism interfering with the lovely free market.
Swear I’m not making it up. Those who have facebook, look up the group “STOP blaming capitalism for socialism’s failures!” Its basic premise is that everything that’s wrong with capitalism wasnt’ real capitalism but a corruption that turned it into socialism.
Which begs the question; if capitalism is so easily corruptible, if it can only exist in a Platonic ideal form, then what’s the point of it? How is that any different from Marxists saying that all the revolutions in history were done wrong and weren’t true Marxism and give us another chance pretty please with a cherry on top?
LikeableInMyOwnWay
Can’t we all just laissez-faire along?
Let’s just become Singapore.
Zero to fastest growing economy in the world, in just four decades. Gotta take the bad with the good though:
Singapore has consistently been rated as one of the least corrupt countries in the world by Transparency International.[43][44]
So much for lawyer shows on tv.
Yeah, our 18th century system and two hundred year fighting over slavery and its aftereffects and our religious albatrosses will surely let us compete with the Singapores of the world. Won’t they? Come on.
priscianus jr
@Corner Stone:
Cat
Several gaping holes in its logic.
1) This article assumes the control of power has stayed with the aforementioned liberals/progressives since the New Deal. This isn’t the case and the regulations meant to keep us from being exploited have been weakened and/or removed by those others.
2) Judges! They control the regulations, are political appointees, and not immune to ideological bias.
3) The amount of exploitation that would be going on if there was a week government is orders of magnitude greater. Yes we are exploited at times, but saying Progressivism/Liberalism is a failure becuase of that is like saying the HIV Cocktail doesn’t work because you still have HIV when you’d be dead without it.
Progressivism/Liberalism works its just constantly under attack from the people who want it to fail.
priscianus jr
@Craig Pennington:
Tonybrown74
People who sometimes make the rules sometimes games the rules, therefore there should be fewer rules??
That’s his argument?
Seriously???
Ugh! Better concern trolling, please!
Downpuppy
The word of the day is “Organize”
The US isn’t unique in the western world by having corporations.
We’re just way behind in having any organized opposition. A big part of it is social organization. Suburbia, anti-intellectuallism, & a high drinking age mean that the transmission of culture between generations is blocked.
Or, to put it another way: Damn kids got no respect for picket lines. Get off my lawn!
Chris
That’s what “Bush was a liberal” and the teabagger “revolt” against the “Republican elites” (associated with supposed RINOs like John McCain) was all about; disassociating the conservative movement from the last thirty years by claiming that all those Repubs were really closet liberals. That way they can go on claiming that true conservatism hasn’t been tried and if only people were ideologically pure enough everything would be fine.
One of the most shameless stunts in the history of politics and it’s hard to believe it actually worked, but for a lot of people, it seems to have.
Stillwater
@batgirl: Excellent take down. I also enjoy his argument, if his thesis is to make any sense at all, that the source of societies oppression and exploitation is the regulatory institutions we put in place as a protection. Because, you know, since market forces are benevolent, it’s only because of these regulations that market players oppress and exploit us. I mean, what else could it be??!!
jl
@priscianus jr:
I agree.
“At one time there was such a thing as an anti-corporate conservative; there is logic to that—the modern corporation was created, or enabled, by government legislation, it is chartered by (state) government, it cannot exist without all kinds of government subsidies and perks”
A perk you did not mention is limited liability of corporate shareholders. No one seems to remember this anymore. Anyone remember the slogan ‘The shareholders bear ALL the risk”? That is simply not true, as anyone who has taken econ or business 101 should know. That seems to have been forgotten over recent decades, due to smothering corporate propaganda that is repeated endlessly as simple truth, when in fact is is simple falsehood asserted as truth.
Also, even though the current Supreme Court decisions, corporations have been granted increasingly sacrosanct personhood through very dubious interpretation Supreme Court precedent (as Sotomayar noted in arguments on the Citizen’s United case), they have the mysterious ability, at least for a real person, to die and resurrect themselves almost at will, which coincidentally often happens after they have used their ‘right’ of limited liability to impose costs on others, while retaining the cash.
These two characteristics allow corporations to impose costs on society while profiting themselves. But this problem of the U.S. private sector counts for nothing, and ‘Keynesians’, ‘New Dealers’ and ‘progressives’ are the root cause of unwarranted power oppressing the good citizens? Really?
This kind of glib and facile rant is the Economist at its worst, except maybe for its zombie original gangster monetarism, that even one of the inventors Milton Friedman himself had the intellectual honesty to disavow when it did not result in useful empirical theory.
I think this is mindless not smart, analysis, and is egregious incoherent libertarian propaganda, not libertarian tinged.
DougJ’s comment makes much more sense, and I do not see why he needed to compliment such claptrap in the Economist.
daveNYC
The only way that campaign finance reform could be considered trivial is if your goal is something insane like getting rid of the government. For those of us who don’t mind having a government around, things like ‘how politicians go about getting elected’ aren’t trivial.
Alex S.
I have a theory that the freedom of the individual can only grow when there is a level playing field between the economic sphere and the political sphere and both of them fight each other for more control (I consider this to be true centrism). If economic interests get too big the individual will be forced to take bad jobs, accept lower wages, be infinitely flexible etc…. And when the government gets too strong we have the Orwellian state – in the extreme case. I guess that libertarians believe that individual freedom is best advanced in a vacuum of interests (well, that would make them anarchists, so let’s say, extremely weakened powers), but that doesn’t seem practical to me, because there will always be forces out there to fill that vacuum (growing bureaucracies, organized religion, a birthright aristocracy). Only when interests take on each other and “bribe” the individual with rights to win their support does personal freedom actually grow.
In my opinion, what went wrong in America is that the economic influence grew too strong and that one party has even given up on making interests compete. The Democrats are still in the catch-all-party mode. They’ve got an intra-party competition of interests when they should be trying to weaken the economic sphere as a reaction to the alliance of the GOP with big business. They should have made a bigger push of the Employee Free Choice Act. The competition of interests between Unions and Management would have given people safer jobs and higher wages. The health-care mandate on the other hand was one more present to interest groups.
I’m not even sure that EFCA was all that popular on the street, it wasn’t in Congress for sure, and one of the reasons why we are on a somewhat negative trajectory is that people don’t know how to achieve freedom and even vote against their interests. Then they don’t understand what’s going on, get crazy and join the Tea Party.
fasteddie9318
I don’t want to veer off into “OBAMA SOLD US OUT” gibberish, but when he says things like this:
It doesn’t help. Now, I don’t know all 20 corporations that were represented at that meeting today, but if any of them were multinationals and/or in the financial sector, then “when [they] do well” it most certainly does not follow that “America does well.” Rarely is the question asked: is our political and media elites learning? And clearly, that question rarely asked because they rarely is.
The comments of the UPS CEO to the effect that we need to get the economy rolling before big corporations will contribute to getting the economy rolling should be instructive, much in the same way that it should be instructive when the Republicans say “we want lower deficits as long as it doesn’t mean doing anything that would lower the deficit,” but again, our leaders just isn’t learning.
Paris
J.K. Galbraith would call this countervailing powers. Gov’t gets bigger and more powerful to control the the bigger more powerful entities like banks and the behemoths like Citi. Make those entities easier to control (smaller?, more diverse?) and the power of the government (and other agencies) can be reduced.
DougJ
@SiubhanDuinne:
Thank you!
Paris
@fasteddie9318: The list I saw was mostly financial institutions.
Chris
In Europe, where “conservative” means drawing on a much older history, it’s never been uncommon. It’s not so long ago (by those standards) that corporations and the free market were the alien, liberal innovations disturbing the status quo of hearth and home, order, tradition and old-school agrarian life. Back then, the bourgeoisie and capitalism were the up-and-coming things, as opposed to aristocracy and mercantilism.
In the U.S, on the other hand, the “anti-corporate conservative” thing was the myth of the small individual entrepreneur competing with the vast faceless corporate machine. These days, it’s not much more than a myth, but the teabaggers have used it pretty effectively to co-opt people who aren’t comfortable with Wall Street.
fasteddie9318
@Paris: So, then I guess the fact that financial firms are having record-breaking success while the rest of the country continues its slow flush down the toilet hasn’t given anybody in the White House a sense that there might be just a tiny disconnect between “how they do” and “how America does.” That’s fucking wonderful.
jl
@fasteddie9318: I don’t want to judge what Obama is doing with that CEO meeting, or what he thinks he is doing.
The one substantive issue that I heard reported is that Obama tried to persuade them to spend more of their cash in investment and making jobs (to get the economy moving again, I suppose).
That effort will fail if the real problem of the very slow and fragile recovery is low aggregate demand due to destruction of household financial asset value during the financial panic.
No group of 20, or 200, or 2000 CEOs, no matter how well intentioned or socially conscious, can deliver that. Only government help in stimulating demand, and setting ground rules for efficient distribution of losses from financial panic can do that in the short to medium run.
If Obama was sincere when he said that, then, in economics, Obama has some shades of Hoover. I am not slamming Obama, just stating what I see to be a fact.
The country has been captured intellectually by a failed reactionary ideology, And that is a problem for anyone who depends on a well function U.S. economy for their welfare, which i would guess includes the vast majority of the commenters here.
P.S. The UPS CEO’s comments seemed well intentioned, as did their general views of what they needed to expand their businesses. I do not see why their views should be assumed to be correct, however. More demand for their products now and over the next five years would mean more for their decision making that what regulations and taxes will look like ten years from now. But they felt they had to say something, so they blurted out boilerplate from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Scott P.
As if well-connected people never got rich on Wall Street before the New Deal.
Exactly, which is why Hitler, for one, didn’t like corporations. Of course, for the Goldbergs of the world, that’s just one more piece of evidence for Liberal Fascism.
AAA Bonds
“Any time anyone says anything libertarian, spit on them.” –Mark Ames
b-psycho
People like Will have a point about the symbiotic relationship between political and corporate power. The rub is that most of his ilk completely ignore what to do about the politically roided-up business behemoths that would be left behind.
Either dismantle those too, or you might as well not bother.
AAA Bonds
@Scott P.:
1) Hitler was fine with corporations as long as they conformed their work and production schedules to the German war machine. You may have heard of Volkswagen.
2) Hitler and the fascists were certainly not traditional German conservatives, who were split into those who opposed Hitler from the traditional right but eventually became his supporters, and the larger number who found it clever to throw in with him as soon as they could because of his rhetoric about traditionalism, while ignoring his paradoxical rhetoric about transforming all of German society into a new animal for the 20th century.
It’s pretty interesting to look at the history of pre-war Germany and exactly how the conservatives in the country tried to square the circle of the Nazis, who claimed in the same breath to be for everything Germany traditionally stood for, and also in favor completely reinventing German society with new government programs, new social institutions, and an upset of the traditional class system.
Eventually, the brutal use of force by the Nazis settled that question: if you were at all inclined toward them, well, time to “get on the train” before they put you on one.
Chris
@Scott P.:
Yes, because the Goldbergs of the world, like our political system, think they exist in a binary world where you can only be either/or, one or the other. Specifically, you’re either part The Right, or you’re the Party Of People We Don’t Like Cause They’re Not Us.
Chris
I read “The Anatomy of Fascism” by Robert Paxton this summer, and he goes into it in a lot of detail – I recommend the book.
Actually, the conservative-fascist relationship is central to his point, if you’ll pardon the phrase. He points out that in the two countries that fell to fascism, the fascists didn’t take power by force or by election – they were invited in by the conservatives in power (Hindenberg in Germany, King Victor Emmanuel in Italy), who figured sharing power with them was preferable to sharing it with the Left.
Heck, it even makes sense if you look at it through their eyes. If you were one of the traditional elites, you’d have to give up some power to the fascists and put up with a certain amount of influence, but your privileges were pretty much guaranteed against the kind of liberal or socialist meddling that had them so worried throughout the XIXth century.
BlizzardOfOz
This reminds me of how DougJ used to get all worked up about Slate and their “mindless contrarianism”. Project much?
DougJ
@BlizzardOfOz:
It’s contrarian to think that a good OMB director would also be good at things to do with banking?
Batocchio
Wilkinson makes some decent points, but makes several silly claims as well: “For a progressive to acknowledge as much is tantamount to abandoning progressivism, “trivialities such as campaign finance reform,” and “The classically liberal answer is to make government less powerful.”
Of course the game is rigged, but Koch-funded “think tanks” like the Cato Institute (where Wilkinson worked, and argued against raising taxes on the rich) want it to stay rigged or rig it further for themselves, to the detriment of most of the country. Some people speak well of Wilkinson, and I’ll assume he’s sincere. However, Chris @9 had the right idea about libertarianism (I’d call it that versus “classical liberalism”) and its “eternal blind spot; the belief that oppression can only come from government, and that if we do away with it somehow we’ll never be oppressed again.”
rf80412
Libertarians are anarchists. They believe a contract, a good lawyer, and a loaded handgun are all anybody needs to secure their rights, and it’s telling they believe that the only thing that can guarantee human rights is property rights. Of course, in the real world, contracts are made to be broken and that’s what lawyers are for, lawyers are expensive (at least for the rest of us), while the logic of the gun leads inevitably to a state not unlike the Cold War: the only way to be safe is to have more guns and an itchier trigger finger than anyone else.
Scott P.
Oh, no doubt he was willing to use them for his own purposes. But on several occasions he expressed a general disdain for corporations.
Corner Stone
@DougJ: It’s odd to project onto Orszag the CW that he was “a fantastic OMB Director” etc.
It sounds very Villagery. And it vexes me. I’m terribly vexed.
Bob
I’m glad at least that Doug points out that in many cases such positions are “post-government payouts”. In most cases the standard line is that the large paydays are because of the influence to be exerted on ones former colleagues. In reality I see it as a deferred payoff in most cases. The politicians get paid off before they get elected (campaign contributions), while they’re in office (bigger campaign contributions, jobs for spouses, etc), and after they leave (as a message to all politicians that they will be “taken care of” when it’s all over). It’s all very profitable for the corporations. Harold Ford is a good example. My own sort of poster boy for this business is Rahm, who made $18 million in 2.5 years in “financial services”…and no one blinked an eye. AFter all, he was “taking care of his family”.
Corner Stone
@fasteddie9318: I heard something striking the other day. And after I heard it, I was like “Duh you stupid sonovabitch! Of course that’s true!”
The guy said, “Every day the CEO of an MNC goes to work thinking how to destroy jobs.”
Summarized off an MSNBC talk show. I think Ratigan.
burnspbesq
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
It exists. It’s a criminal statute, 18 USC Section 207. Violators get jail time, and pursuing 207 cases used to be a major part of the mission of the Public Integrity Section at DOJ before it got politicized.
I got a half-hour lecture about it in my exit interview when I left the IRS. I’d bet $100 that Orszag got substantially the same lecture when he left the Government.
FuzzyWuzzy
@kth: More like take your ball and go home, as if to make progress is a moment in time that stops. Progressivism must constantly move forward and improve upon itself precisely for the reason that conservatism must be dragged kicking and screaming like a spoilt and fearful child into the present.
Look how far conservatives have been forced to move ahead-now they grumble about not being able to call people the N word anymore, when it used to be not so long ago they were complaining about the FBI not letting them hang people in lynch mobs.
What if the only anchors they have left for their world view is regressive religion, firearms ownership and servility to their masters?
Corner Stone
@Corner Stone: Damn DougJ. You need to read the link re: Orszag that Atrios puts up:
Orszag is an asshole