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.