Robert Naiman wrote: > I totally agree that ' "reasonable government policy" doesn't fall > from the sky.' My point was that in industrial democracies, post-1945, > "Great Depressions" don't fall from the sky either. The last 100 years > of historical experience suggests that the U.S. could only suffer a > "Great Depression" if the U.S. government pursues policies that abet a > "Great Depression." And people should reasonably expect the government > not to pursue such policies.
Why? people should reasonably expect the government not to invade countries like Iraq, too. and people should reasonable expect the government (and its agents, like the Fed) not to promote gigantic financial bubbles that require expensive mop-ups and/or recessions. But these things happen. Part of the problem (at least in the US) is that the state isn't subject to very much democratic control and has been able to misinform and disinform the public. "Informed democracy" might be a utopian slogan at this point in history, though things might change in the future. When you say that "a modicum of informed democracy should suffice" below, is that a normative assertion, i.e., of what should be? or is it a statement of fact? > While I am all for a "mass workers > movement," it shouldn't be necessary for this purpose - it hasn't been > necessary in the past. A modicum of informed democracy should suffice. It's true that the US government (I can't speak of the Canadian one) doesn't _always_ run the economy into the depressionary ground. There _are_ other forces (as Patrick and I both mentioned) besides a mass workers' movement that counteracts the tendency of the laissez-faire/"feed the financiers" cliques to drive the economy into disaster. One force is that _after_ a financial disaster, the capitalists themselves usually sober up and turn against the drunken behavior of the financiers, etc. Bringing in other political forces (the middle classes) to provide political backing, they impose financial regulations like those of the New Deal. But that kind of reform movement was driven ahead by fear that _something worse_ (from the establishmentarian perspective) would hit, i.e., communism, anarchism, socialism, or fascism. The social disorder of the 1930s formed FDR's backbone. To ruling out any semblance of a "mass workers' movement," we can think about the late 1940s & the 1950s in the US, in which the labor movement was split, was rid of its more militant elements, became bureaucratized, and thus started its long decline. Absent the kind of pressure that produced social democracy in other countries, there had to be a white knight (as it were) to create forces that shore up the economy. As both Patrick and I mentioned, this was military Keynesianism, which included such niceties as the GI Bill and the building of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. In a context where the US was literally "on top of the world," this stabilized the US economy, along with (in decreasing order of importance) the financial reforms left over from the 1930s, and a mild version of the welfare state, a leftover from the mass struggles of the 1930s. Of course, this stable system eventually led to squeezed profits and stagflation, which (along with fading memories of the Depression) started the movement to engineer a replay of the 1920s. But that's another story. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
