How about a "Marxist view of liberalism as a single-minded defense of capitalism." Now there's a stunning new theory. It comes to us from Edmund Fawcett's new book, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea as reviewed by Katrina Forrester.
It must be something about the start of a new year that has the left is scrambling to explain six years of horrendous policy failure. Had these last six years not culminated in the resounding rejection of liberalism in the November midterms I'm sure there would be no such soul searching. As it turned out, even on the left the failures can't be ignored, so liberals, or progressives, as they so like to be called, are out with the explanations. This latest is a doozy, though. Marxism was really all about rescuing capitalism. Who knew!
Naturally, the basis of this new interpretation is an untruth.
For the defenders of Lockean liberalism, why liberals accommodated empire is a central puzzle: How could defenders of liberty defend colonial exploitation? ...Fawcett dissolves the puzzle. Exploiting the riches of empire abroad was one way for states to resolve political conflict and economic turmoil at home. Much of the time, debates about empire were just an extension of the question of how to pay for liberal capitalism.
It's not just that progressives are still talking about colonialism, long after colonial empires have ceased to exist. There is also the deliberate misrepresentation, about the nature of wealth. Progressives insist that economics is a zero-sum game. They reason that somebody, somewhere, has to have gotten poorer in order for anyone, like, oh let's say Warren Buffett, to get richer. It's a lie, really. But it's a crucial principle, without which this wonderful new theory makes absolutely no sense. Here's Ms. Forrester explaining Fawcett's supposed epiphany about who "pays for" capitalism.
It was in the 1930s that the question of how to rescue capitalism from itself was brought into sharpest relief. Fawcett looks to three economists who had different ideas about who would pay for the rescue: John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Irving Fisher. Each provided answers that would shape the future of economic thought and practice. Keynes’s focus on high wages was equivalent to earlier liberals’ concessions to demands for universal suffrage; his economic program was an example of liberalism’s economic compromise with democracy. Hayek’s willingness to belittle politics and look to the market for solutions harked back to an imaginary nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberalism and set the stage for the neoliberalism that followed. Fisher stressed the dangers of falling prices and the role of government monetary policy in preventing booms and busts. Though their recommendations were different, Fawcett emphasizes their similarities: all wanted to “limit capitalism’s disruptive instabilities” while protecting liberal principles. For Hayek (who worried least about capitalism’s disruptive potential), labor would bear the costs of saving capitalism. For Keynes and Fisher, because government paid for the rescue, in effect everyone played their part.
It's BS, of course. It really doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that capitalism, or the fruits of it to be more precise, pays for everything else. What Forrester and perhaps Fawcett don't get is that it isn't capitalism that needs to be paid for, it's those grubby little politicians who line their own pockets with taxpayer money by promising to fix the supposed problems of capitalism. Here's one: "the gap between the rich and the poor." It's a non-existent problem really. Nervertheless, taxing "the rich" and regulating everything else was supposed to fix it. But six years of such disastrous progressive policy under Obama have made the rich richer (those connected to the Democrats and Obama), the poor poorer, and progressives a bit desparate. And so the explanations come.
Or maybe sales pitch would be a better way to describe the progressive philosophy. In actuality, progressives are the new entrepreneurs. Their product is "fairness" which they deliver through expanded government, which at this point can fairly be described as bloated. Under Obama progressives have realized massive profits through government delivered fairness. Take Jonathan Gruber, one of ObamaCare's key architects. He pulled in an estimated $4 million by helping to fashion a deliberately misleading and complex piece of federal legislation that depended upon, in his words, the “stupidity of the American voter” for passage.
The beauty of making your money through government sponsored fairness is that you're not constrained by the same rules that might apply to car dealer, or a loan officer, or anybody else who might be involved in the unpardonable sin of making a profit. No. Champions of "social justice" can say whatever they like. "You can keep your doctor, period," comes to mind.
We know how that worked out. In spite of that there are still legions who favor centrally planned solutions like ObamaCare, who can disregard the actual fruits of it, who can pardon the lies that sold it. And in case you're wondering why, just remember this. There's a huge amount of money to be made in central planning. It's a wonderful thing — for everybody except the ones in whose names the wonderful plans are made.
Progressive policies don't work very well in the real world, and after a while people get it, and they push back against it. The 2014 midterms for instance. When that happens progressives fight for market share with new strategies, new messages, and brilliant new insights. Like how Marxism is really all about defending capitalism.
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