I am not insane....really...
photo by Getty images...
I was developing my thesis on the absurdity of current conservative economic premises and having trouble calling to memory those economists who posited those same positions...when I came back in to check through the blogosphere, I happened to click on a long-forgotten bookmark called "The Baseline Scenario" which happens to be written by one of the more prominent economic theorist of the current era, Simon Johnson...and he turned me to this link. It was as refreshing as a sip of water from a desert oasis.
Here's the gist of it:
My opponent is a firm ( firm? try DEVOUT) believer in the theory of free markets. He believes all government interference in ANY market is wrong. He is a true follower of Adam Smith in that he believes the "invisibile and unerring hand" of the "market will take care of everything. This borders on Randian or libertarian beliefs but we won't go into that....
The article I stumbled upon is an interview with Peter Temin, a noted Professor of Economics at MIT. This interview gave perfect voice to my positions...here are some examples:
"In my opinion, macroeconomics has lost its way. The kind of models that many people use—general equilibrium models—start from assumptions of perfect competition, omniscient consunmers, and various like things which give rise to an efficient economy. As far as I know, there has never been an economy that actually looked like that—it’s an intellectual construct."
The "free market" never has and never will exist. It is an economic construct used to build a theory of macroeconomics that has never worked anywhere in the world. There's more...
But many people claim that the outcomes of that economy are natural outcomes. When you say “natural,” you already have an emotionally laden term. Deviations from the “natural”—say, like, minimum wage laws, or unions, or governments that give food stamps, or earned income tax credits—are interferences with the natural order and are therefore “unnatural."
This is where the current union-bashing, public employee basing, anti-social welfare and anti-government sentiment itself is coming from...
And this part has a troubling overtone to it:
The general equilibirum (sic)view tends to lend support to those who want to make the economy more efficient in the sense of having fewer “distortions”—you know, all of these neutral economic words—from taxes, from labor unions, from minimum wages, and so on. Now, what has happened in the last thirty years—and this is what Hacker and Pearson note in their book [Winner-Take-All Politics]—is we have gotten ourselves into a feedback situation. As people have gotten richer, conservative people have funded organizations which generate economic research promoting their political views.
Like...maybe the Koch Brothers? Like maybe what has happened at Florida State University?
And he has something to say about Wisconsin too....you should read the whole article. It's short and too his credit, it is one of the most easily understood economic essays I've read in a long, long time...
I'll quit arguing with myself now...
n.b. My golf swing still sucks...
