Will the Real Pragmatist Please Stand Up

OK. So now I really feel like an underachiever. Not only is the president-elect younger than I am, but the apparent choice for Secretary of the Treasury was also a government major at Dartmouth, and a year behind me! My new obsession is scanning pictures of Tim Geithner and trying to visualize what he looked like almost thirty years ago. I wonder if we were in any classes together. I think I might have recognized him, and I believe that he was a geek. You know, one of those people even back then who was planning on rising to some position of power. I was just trying to figure out what career would keep me from having a mid-life crisis.

But everyone is calling him a pragmatist, not an ideologue, and the markets react by lurching upward almost 500 points. That bothers me. I’m beginning to agree with Naomi Kline: if the markets like it, it probably won’t work. Everyone seems to be thinking that what we’ve had—Bush, Clinton, Reagan—have been pragmatists. They weren’t! They were ideologues!

The best book to learn about economics is by Charles Lindblom, a political scientist who discovered political economy and wrote Politics and Markets. In it he says that the core job of all governments is to allocate resources. They might do a bad job, and give it all to corporate titans or Imelda Marcos, or they might see that the only way to resist the market’s natural tendency to create inequality is to have some mechanism of redistribution.

There are only two ways to distribute resources: markets or planning. To say that we can only use markets is ideological. To say that we can only use planning is ideological. To say that we need both is, you got it, pragmatic. What the media and right-wing pundits, and I include Larry Summers in this category, and perhaps my classmate Tim Geithner, are suggesting is that any move away from complete reliance on markets would be embracing an ideological position. They’re implying that we’re inching toward Marx. Perhaps, but inching is not embracing. Who we would be embracing are American Nobel Laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, as well as Bangladeshi/Indian Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen. These three eminently pragmatic economists understand the limitations of markets. They do not endorse eradication of markets (you can never do that—see the drug trade). They endorse mixed-markets: government involvement in guiding markets and production.

We already do that, but we pretend that we don’t. However, the government is not being guided by the public, for the public good. It is being guided by multi-national corporations and finance, for the good of the markets. I don’t understand the people who don’t trust a government that you can elect, and instead trust spoiled corporate leaders that you can’t elect. That’s either some effective brainwashing or powerful witchcraft. I haven’t decided which.

Actually, I’m wrong. Believing only in the markets is not an ideology. That would be based on some theoretical reasoning. This is an unrealistic faith. It is a religion.

New Republican Ideas?

Update 11/23:  Daily Kos has a post critiquing the Republicans as  party of ideas.

I keep hearing blathering experts on teevee that the Republicans failed because they aren’t the “party of ideas” anymore. Most of the people who say this are Republicans.

It reminds me of a conversation I had a couple of years with a friend of mine who had worked over thirty years at the Fed. She had taken a class of mine on international political economy and had come to realize, I believe, that you can’t use the market to solve all problems. (A key text was Everything for Sale, by Robert Kuttner.)

She said, “The problem with the left is that their ideas are so complicated, while the right’s are so simple: Just use the market.” While that simple one-size-fits-all solution might lend itself to effective marketing, it sure doesn’t work when we’re in a economic Armageddon. Almost by definition the Republicans can’t come up with any new ideas. If they did, coming up with something other than their wonderfully simple, and simplistic, “just use the market”, they would cease to be Republicans.

Health Care and Republicans

Update #3 11/25/08:  Great diary at Daily Kos by Jason Rosenbaum giving some background on why the right wants to kill health care reform.  It is as I have said.

Update #2 11/23/08:  Huffington Post now has the ball, citing the Daily Kos and Cato, and including a new analysis published today by US News.

Update:  I was not aware of this post, but even the Cato Institute's people make the same analysis, even though they think it would be bad, evil socialism.

It is almost a truism in public policy that programs that are merit-based, like welfare, are vulnerable to being reduced. On the other hand, programs that are universal, like Social Security, are extremely popular. Once you get them, and they start benefiting you, you can’t imagine what life was like without it.

Now imagine the remaining geographic enclave of the conservative base, Appalachia. What would it mean to those rural folk to get good, universal, and cheap, health care? To be able to take their sick parents or children for care that might save their lives? It would be the end of the fear of progressive politics. Like the threats of the slippery slope of socialism that Wall Street and big business voiced during the enacting of the New Deal, when FDR enacted socialist legislation like unemployment insurance, child-labor laws, minimum wage laws, and overtime pay, the propaganda warning us against state-run health care will be forgotten. The Republican Party will gain the reputation as the party that kept the poor folk of the hollows of Appalachia from being able to see a doctor.

That’s why the Republican Party will fight like hell to keep universal health care from being enacted, not because they think it will not work, but because they know that it will.

Now just imagine if they had good schools!

The Iconic Image

UPDATE: Maureen Dowd of NYT fame just purloined my ebay idea! She even used it as her most clever closing idea! Sheesh.

I’ve been doing an informal poll with my friends and colleagues after the election about what they considered the most powerful image during the televised coverage election night. By far, the majority of those I ask come up with the same image, which was also mine. Some of them think quite long, and then come up with the image. Can you think of what it might be?

While you’re thinking, I’ll share an idea of mine about Sarah Palin’s shopping spree. If she wants to look good, and perhaps make a little coin off the whole thing, she should do what she says she is good at, and sell it off on eBay! I’m sure there are some poor rubes out in the rural confines of Real America who would pay even more than what Sarah paid for the clothes. They can wear it to the sewing bee or the barn raising, and say, “Sarah Palin wore this Escada in Ohio!”

Back to the iconic image. Figure it out yet?  The second most mentioned image was that of the two families on stage, the Obamas and the Bidens. And the first most mentioned image? Jesse Jackson weeping. It floored everybody, at least everybody who has the gene to read facial expressions. I found a Los Angeles Times blog on Jesse crying, and a lot of the comments were just snarky! (My favorite word learned during the election.) How they could think of his tears as strategic, or manipulative, just shows that they are the same people who ran down to the gun store and bought the last AK-47 on the rack. Jackson had kneeled by the dying Martin Luther King on the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Forty years later, Jackson stood in Grant Park and watched an African American elected president of the United States. When they make the movie of Jackon’s life, I bet it begins in Grant Park.

Note: Yet another who agrees with me, Judith Warner of the NYT.