The darling of LBO offers his thoughts on the crisis:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v00/n03/zize01_.html
The standard ‘trickle-down’ argument against redistribution (through
progressive taxation etc) is that instead of making the poor richer,
it makes the rich poorer. However, this apparently anti-
interventionist attitude actually contains an argument for the
current state intervention: although we all want the poor to get
better, it is counter-productive to help them directly, since they
are not the dynamic and productive element; the only intervention
needed is to help the rich get richer, and then the profits will
automatically spread down to the poor. Throw enough money at Wall
Street, and it will eventually trickle down to Main Street. If you
want people to have money to build, don’t give it to them directly,
help those who are lending it to them. This is the only way to
create genuine prosperity – otherwise, the state is merely
distributing money to the needy at the expense of those who create
wealth.
It is all too easy to dismiss this line of reasoning as a
hypocritical defence of the rich. The problem is that as long as we
are stuck with capitalism, there is a truth in it: the collapse of
Wall Street really will hit ordinary workers. That is why the
Democrats who supported the bailout were not being inconsistent with
their leftist leanings. They would fairly be called inconsistent
only if we accept the premise of Republican populists that
capitalism and the free market economy are a popular, working-class
affair, while state interventions are an upper-class strategy to
exploit hard-working ordinary people.
--ravi
--
Support something better than yourself ;-)
PeTA => http://peta.org/
Greenpeace => http://greenpeace.org/
If you have nothing better to read: http://platosbeard.org/
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