Inequality in Capitalist Systems Is Not InevitableThere was no rational need for Thoma to slobber over the Free Market Fairy at the very beginning of his piece unless he's part of the problem.
By Mark Thoma
The Fiscal Times
March 11, 2014
Capitalism is the best economic system yet discovered for giving people the goods and services they desire at the lowest possible price, and for producing innovative economic growth.
UPDATE: Thomas Frank has a great rebuttal to Thoma's slobbering -
Recall for a moment the situation in which Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009. During the preceding decade, we had endured a tech bubble and a housing bubble; our accounting industry had been suborned in all sorts of ways; our prize stock analysts had been suborned in all sorts of different ways; our leaders and foreign-policy pundits had sold us a war in Iraq using completely bogus reasoning; our investment houses specialized in cooking up poisoned investments; our ratings agencies specialized in hanging blue ribbons on them; and the executives of our financial industry specialized in helping themselves to stupendous bonuses even as they lost billions—even as they blasted holes in the economy of the world.
What Americans understood when we looked over this panorama of fraud and incompetence and self-dealing was that expert authority had been corrupted at every point where it was exposed to organized money. The meritocracy was obviously broken.
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2 comments:
And if one had assumed at the time that Obama's vote to bail out the corrupt non-meritocracy had confirmed and sealed his identity as one of them (rather than as e.g. a sleuth reformer) one would have been correct.
Yup. I came across a passage from one of his books in which he noted how easy it is to slip into the top 1% mentality.
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