Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Post-modern liberalism didn't spring full-blown into being like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. It evolved rather over time from classical liberalism through several fairly-distinct phases. You're right on this. But it might be more accurate to say that at any given time progressivism was a mix of relatively libertarian, modified laissez-faire liberal types (the Brandeisians and J.A. Hobson across the pond) and more authoritarian types like the Fabians and their American counterparts. The libertarian end of the spectrum, certainly, there were things like the recall and public initiative. But this same good government movement, from the very beginning, also favored city-wide school boards, larger wards or at-large aldermen, etc., as a way of placing government policy safely under the control of professionals and keeping the great unwashed from meddling in the business of their betters. It was the same kind of petty lust for control that Hilaire Belloc and William English Walling described in their critiques of Fabianism. And it tied in pretty closely with the authoritarianism of the public education bureaucracy, the deskilling of blue collar labor under Taylor's scientific management, in a much broader phenomenon of the rise to control of the white collar professional class in the late 19th century. Even when progressives were more sympathetic to the relatively libertarian part of the mix, the increasing centralization of the corporate economy and the state made it likely that their movement would succeed only in those areas where centralized bureaucracies benefitted. In the earliest stages of progressivism people still by and large believed in free markets and private property, but believed that left entirely to themselves, free markets produced monopolies which had to be broken by antitrust action. These early antitrust progressive are sometimes known as Brandeisians, and we see their imprint heavily upon Wilson's New Freedom platform. The next stage of progressivism invovled allowing the big businesses to remain unbroken, but regulating them with the federal government, a few we find heavily influencing TR's New Nationalism platform of 1912. New Nationalism contained no explicit calls for cartelization, but it evolved into Hoover's New Individualism (a rather contradicatory name for what it described) in which government would, mostly informally, support the cartelization agreements of Big Business. Hoover's voluntary cartelization finally, by the New Deal, evolved into outright calls for goverment-forced cartelization that heavily animated the NIRA of 1933. It's worth note that the Brandeisians fought the NIRA bitterly, and their influence on the Supreme Court got it declared unConstitutional. Cartelization remained anathema to old Progressives right through the New Deal. David Levenstam In a message dated 6/18/03 12:24:15 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Actually, they support state capitalism under the name of progressivism or putting people first or some equally inane goo-goo slogan. Just about every part of the Progressive/New Deal agenda reflected the interests of big business in cartelizing and stabilizing the corporate economy; it was just sold to the public as a progressive restraint on big business. Please bear in mind that what was called socialism by democratic socialists in the 1920s would not have been recognized as such by most of the classical socialists of the nineteenth century. The difference reflects the New Class takeover of the working class movement, by Leninists and Fabians, at the turn of the century. Revisionist historians like Gabriel Kolko and James Weinstein called the phenomenon political capitalism or corporate liberalism. Murray Rothbard agreed with their analysis. Whatever you call it, it is organized capital acting through the state. The court intellectuals of corporate liberalism (Art Schlesinger) like to depict the movement as an idealistic attempt to set countervailing power against the giant corporations. And a lot of big business propagandists like to howl about how anti-business forces have won consistently. But in fact, it is a case of Brer Rabbit hollering Please don't fling me in that briar patch! _ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon
Actually, they support state capitalism under the name of progressivism or putting people first or some equally inane goo-goo slogan. Just about every part of the Progressive/New Deal agenda reflected the interests of big business in cartelizing and stabilizing the corporate economy; it was just sold to the public as a progressive restraint on big business. Please bear in mind that what was called socialism by democratic socialists in the 1920s would not have been recognized as such by most of the classical socialists of the nineteenth century. The difference reflects the New Class takeover of the working class movement, by Leninists and Fabians, at the turn of the century. Revisionist historians like Gabriel Kolko and James Weinstein called the phenomenon political capitalism or corporate liberalism. Murray Rothbard agreed with their analysis. Whatever you call it, it is organized capital acting through the state. The court intellectuals of corporate liberalism (Art Schlesinger) like to depict the movement as an idealistic attempt to set countervailing power against the giant corporations. And a lot of big business propagandists like to howl about how anti-business forces have won consistently. But in fact, it is a case of Brer Rabbit hollering Please don't fling me in that briar patch! From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 21:58:42 EDT I tend to agree with Marc, but it's worth note that while no avowed socialist has ever gotten into the double-digits (Eugene V. Debs peaked at 6% in 1912), the Democratic Party has enacted virtually every plank in the 1928 Socialist Party platform, and the Republicans have come to accept virtually all of it too. Americans don't like to support something called socialism, but they often support socialism by some other name. David In a message dated 6/13/03 7:04:45 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Well, the average American is not so pro-freedom as, say, Walter Williams, but considerably more so than the average Frenchman or German. Really? How do you measure this? Well, we can start with the fact that in the first-round of a typical presidential election in France, 2/3 of the votes go to candidates so far to the Left they make Ralph Nader look moderate, and about 1/2 of these votes, or 1/3 of the total, go to out-and-out Marxists of one sort or another, candidates who are avowed Trotskyites, Stalinists, etc. In U.S. presidential elections, no avowed socialist has *ever* garnered more than one or two percent of the vote. Marc Poitras _ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon
From: Bryan Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] Kevin Carson wrote: I'd say just the opposite, that SS is an important component of state capitalism; and like most regulations and welfare spending, it serves to cartelize the economy. By acting through the state to organize pension programs, the large corporations effectively function as a state-enforced cartel (with the added virtue of non-defectability), and at least partially remove old age pensions as an issue of competion in personnel costs. This is just silly. If the situation was competitive initially, employers just switch to cash compensation. Indeed, this is just a variation on the popular fallacy that employers really do pay half of SS just because the law says so, when in reality it depends on labor supply and demand elasticities (and since the former is near-infinite, employers pay essentially 0% whether the law says they pay 0% or 100%). Regardless of whether pension costs are really passed on to workers, the supply of pension benefits is nevertheless an issue of competition between employers unless it is cartelized. Are you suggesting that collusion in regard to some aspect of competition is irrelevant to the total competitiveness of the situation? Why, then, the recurring talk of fighting the Canadian national health in the WTO as giving a competitive advantage to Canadian employers against U.S. firms that provide private coverage to employees? And although demand elasticities are quite finite in an oligopoly market, they are nevertheless there. So remuneration of labor remains an issue of competition between firms as far as the consumer is concerned. The principle remains: when the state intervenes in any area of the free market, it is effectively removing that area from the realm of competition, to the same extent as if corporations came to the arrangement by private agreement. -- Prof. Bryan Caplan Department of Economics George Mason University http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] The game of just supposing Is the sweetest game I know... And if the things we dream about Don't happen to be so, That's just an unimportant technicality. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, *Showboat* _ Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963
Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon
Post-modern liberalism didn't spring full-blown into being like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. It evolved rather over time from classical liberalism through several fairly-distinct phases. In the earliest stages of progressivism people still by and large believed in free markets and private property, but believed that left entirely to themselves, free markets produced monopolies which had to be broken by antitrust action. These early antitrust progressive are sometimes known as Brandeisians, and we see their imprint heavily upon Wilson's New Freedom platform. The next stage of progressivism invovled allowing the big businesses to remain unbroken, but regulating them with the federal government, a few we find heavily influencing TR's New Nationalism platform of 1912. New Nationalism contained no explicit calls for cartelization, but it evolved into Hoover's New Individualism (a rather contradicatory name for what it described) in which government would, mostly informally, support the cartelization agreements of Big Business. Hoover's voluntary cartelization finally, by the New Deal, evolved into outright calls for goverment-forced cartelization that heavily animated the NIRA of 1933. It's worth note that the Brandeisians fought the NIRA bitterly, and their influence on the Supreme Court got it declared unConstitutional. Cartelization remained anathema to old Progressives right through the New Deal. David Levenstam In a message dated 6/18/03 12:24:15 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Actually, they support state capitalism under the name of progressivism or putting people first or some equally inane goo-goo slogan. Just about every part of the Progressive/New Deal agenda reflected the interests of big business in cartelizing and stabilizing the corporate economy; it was just sold to the public as a progressive restraint on big business. Please bear in mind that what was called socialism by democratic socialists in the 1920s would not have been recognized as such by most of the classical socialists of the nineteenth century. The difference reflects the New Class takeover of the working class movement, by Leninists and Fabians, at the turn of the century. Revisionist historians like Gabriel Kolko and James Weinstein called the phenomenon political capitalism or corporate liberalism. Murray Rothbard agreed with their analysis. Whatever you call it, it is organized capital acting through the state. The court intellectuals of corporate liberalism (Art Schlesinger) like to depict the movement as an idealistic attempt to set countervailing power against the giant corporations. And a lot of big business propagandists like to howl about how anti-business forces have won consistently. But in fact, it is a case of Brer Rabbit hollering Please don't fling me in that briar patch!
Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon
I would agree that not every government infringement of liberty warrants the label socialist, although on a larger level a rose by any other name still has thorns. It's ironic, however, that Tom chose pension reform as an example to illustrate the point that not all government infringement of liberty is socialism, both because our Social Security system represents a massive transfer of income from poor young minority workers to idle, elderly white women--surely one of the vilest forms of socialism--and because German Marxists in league with Bismark out-maneuvered German (classical) liberals to produce pension reform as their first socialist success. Most polls, incidentally, demonstrate that most Americans under the age of 40 do not believe that Social Security will be around to take care of them. Whether or not people need to be forced to save for themselves represents a value-judgement, not some sort of postulate of economics. I think we all agree that no poor person needs to forced to save for a wealthy person. DBL In a message dated 6/17/03 4:25:06 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Americans don't like to support something called socialism, but they often support socialism by some other name. David All but a very few Americans, including economists, are in favor of socialized money. That is the most pervasive socialist program in the USA. It's a mistake to confuse the word socialist by refering to gov't money as socialist money. Most folks, I'm sure, would state that socialist money means the gov't gives more money to those who need it, taking from those who have it. E.g. gov't socialist redistribution. I don't even know why you want to call the monopoly legal tender laws socialized money -- but now I'm not certain this is what you mean. There has long been a freedom-security trade off. People want both, but will usually choose more real/ felt security in return for small amounts of (unrecognized?) freedom. Social security is widely supported because of the certainty element, folks are sure that they'll be taken care of by the SS program. Since one of the main costs of inflation is the greater uncertainty, a reduced inflation/ uncertainty is worth quite a lot of freedom to many people. One conclusion I draw is support for mandatory savings programs, including, in Slovakia, a 3-pillar pension reform where the first pillar is a minimum poverty amount, pay-as-you-go from the budget; the second pillar is a required savings amount, which becomes your own inheritable property; the third is a tax-advantaged optional savings amount. Generally the irresponsible folk need to be forced to save more for themselves, to reduce the number of needy in the future. Tom Grey
RE: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon
Sorry, David, you misunderstood me (or at least what I thought I meant). I first tried to point out that gov't money was one thing, not so much socialism. But SS is something else -- I guess I should have said most folks would agree that social security is a form of socialism, but would add that it's pretty good. I certainly meant that SS is prolly the most recognized socialism/ socialist policy in the US. One of the ways to save SS is the, so far unpopular, means testing. The huge drugs bills should all include means testing. I certainly oppose forcing the poor to save or subsidize the rich! Tom -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 17 June, 2003 12:43 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon I would agree that not every government infringement of liberty warrants the label socialist, although on a larger level a rose by any other name still has thorns. It's ironic, however, that Tom chose pension reform as an example to illustrate the point that not all government infringement of liberty is socialism, both because our Social Security system represents a massive transfer of income from poor young minority workers to idle, elderly white women--surely one of the vilest forms of socialism--and because German Marxists in league with Bismark out-maneuvered German (classical) liberals to produce pension reform as their first socialist success. Most polls, incidentally, demonstrate that most Americans under the age of 40 do not believe that Social Security will be around to take care of them. Whether or not people need to be forced to save for themselves represents a value-judgement, not some sort of postulate of economics. I think we all agree that no poor person needs to forced to save for a wealthy person. DBL
Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon
Thanks for the clarification Tom. I do agree that government money, as it predates socialism, probably doesn't rightly fall under the category of socialism. I wonder though if most folks would agree that social security is socialism. Americans don't like to admit that they like socialism. and FDR sold social security by giving it its own devoted tax and claim that the tax is a retirement contribution. Millions of Americans view Social Security benefits as their right, not because they see the benefits as socialist redistribution, but rather because they view the benefits as socialist redistribution but rather as the result of their own contirbutions. It's no wonder that the primary beneficiaries of Social Security oppose means-testing. David In a message dated 6/17/03 10:27:09 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Sorry, David, you misunderstood me (or at least what I thought I meant). I first tried to point out that gov't money was one thing, not so much socialism. But SS is something else -- I guess I should have said most folks would agree that social security is a form of socialism, but would add that it's pretty good. I certainly meant that SS is prolly the most recognized socialism/ socialist policy in the US. One of the ways to save SS is the, so far unpopular, means testing. The huge drugs bills should all include means testing. I certainly oppose forcing the poor to save or subsidize the rich! Tom
RE: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon -- pension reform
Yes, many feel that, since they contributed, they should get the benefits. This lie is pernicious. All politicians should be stating that the money paid in has already gone out -- and money received by retired folks now is money taxed by current workers. On the other hand, that's also not sooo different than normal banks. I actually think a 3 pillar program for America might work, too: with a statement of exactly how much each worker has contributed (NO interest? same interest as on US savings bonds?) with that total lump sum being calculated and treated as the first (min benefit) and second pillars. A full second pillar includes forced savings, which becomes the property of the individual. And a third, IRA type optional pillar, which would reduce the basic benefits in some 1:2 proportion. Tom Subject: Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon Thanks for the clarification Tom. I do agree that government money, as it predates socialism, probably doesn't rightly fall under the category of socialism. I wonder though if most folks would agree that social security is socialism. Americans don't like to admit that they like socialism. and FDR sold social security by giving it its own devoted tax and claim that the tax is a retirement contribution. Millions of Americans view Social Security benefits as their right, not because they see the benefits as socialist redistribution, but rather because they view the benefits as socialist redistribution but rather as the result of their own contirbutions. It's no wonder that the primary beneficiaries of Social Security oppose means-testing. David
Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon
Well, the average American is not so pro-freedom as, say, Walter Williams, but considerably more so than the average Frenchman or German. So it's all relative. By the way, contrary to Kinsley's assertion, wage and price controls were not merely a cynical re-election ploy. There was a real problem associated with the fact that at the time the Bretton Woods exchange rate overvalued the dollar and the domestic U.S. inflation was making the problem worse. If I'm not mistaken, wage and price controls and the Bretton Woods system were both abandoned at about the same time, which is probably not a coincidence. Marc Poitras
Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon
Well, the average American is not so pro-freedom as, say, Walter Williams, but considerably more so than the average Frenchman or German. Really? How do you measure this? The remarkable fact is that it is apparently perfectly legal for the government in the United States to control the price of just about everything - i.e. fascism - I mean this as literally and not in a loose derogatory sense - is constitutional in the U.S. This really illustrates that a) the constitution counts for pretty much nothing if the public wants something to happen and b) the public is not so freedom loving as to not want wage and price controls on everything. Hence Kinsley's conclusion that there is a danger of big losses in freedom should the public buy some story that reductions in freedom are necessary for security the way they apparently bought that government control of price and wages was necessary to control inflation. Alex -- Alexander Tabarrok Department of Economics, MSN 1D3 George Mason University Fairfax, VA, 22030 Tel. 703-993-2314 Web Page: http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/ and Director of Research The Independent Institute 100 Swan Way Oakland, CA, 94621 Tel. 510-632-1366
Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon
Alex Tabarrok [EMAIL PROTECTED]To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Sent by: Subject: Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] u.edu 06/13/2003 04:42 PM Please respond to ARMCHAIR Well, the average American is not so pro-freedom as, say, Walter Williams, but considerably more so than the average Frenchman or German. Really? How do you measure this? Well, we can start with the fact that in the first-round of a typical presidential election in France, 2/3 of the votes go to candidates so far to the Left they make Ralph Nader look moderate, and about 1/2 of these votes, or 1/3 of the total, go to out-and-out Marxists of one sort or another, candidates who are avowed Trotskyites, Stalinists, etc. In U.S. presidential elections, no avowed socialist has *ever* garnered more than one or two percent of the vote. Marc Poitras
