This is obvious to most PEN-Lers, but surprisingly not so obvious even to a progressive political theorist like Corey Robin:
This blog post is well worth the read - including some of the comments where there are some progressive dissenters. http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/a-response-to-corey-robin-on-the-political-idea-of-monetary-policy/ ----------------------------snip >From a series of legal codes favoring creditors, a two-tier justice system that ignore abuses in foreclosures and property law, a system of surveillance dedicated to maximum observation on spending, behavior and ultimate collection of those with debt and beyond, there’s been a wide refocusing of the mechanisms of our society towards the crucial obsession of oligarchs: wealth and income defense. Control over money itself is the last component of oligarchical income defense, and it needs to be as contested as much as we contest all the other mechanisms. If one of your primary political objectives is income defense then anything that increases, as Yglesias puts it, “the cost of hoarding cash,” is a major problem. Even if that cash is worthless debt from a credit and housing bubble that has collapsed long ago, defending it, no matter what the costs to the real economy, is priority #1. In this case, monetary policy redistributes from creditors to debtors and thus puts balances between, as Bob Kuttner puts it, ”the claims of the past and the potential of the future.” And rather than historically bounded, I think it needs to be placed in a longer intellectual debate. It seems like a lot of historians and political scientists are turning their focus to the 1970s as the time when the liberal coalition fully collapsed and conservatism found its legs (see this Rick Perlstein summary in The Nation). I’ll leave it to others to figure that out, but it certainly seems like the 1970s stagflation was the death of the Keynesian economic agenda. And in the same way the strong language of justice disappeared from liberal lexicon in the 1960s, the language of inflation, money and the demand in the economy disappeared in the ashes of the 1970s. Which is a problem. Conservatives think money is something that exists independently and naturally throughout time and that any attempt to change it is, as Reagan said of inflation, “as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.” And they are very comfortable working this language as just another form of common sense. But going back to the Cross of Gold speech, through Franklin Roosevelt’s abandonment of the gold standard and aggressive price targeting, progressives and liberals have had a long-tradition with monetary battles. These battles have disappeared from the agenda, but it needs to come back as we have the right answer: money is a social creation, one that the government has a responsibility to use to stabilizing growth, prices and full employment with a view towards building a future without overheating the system or letting it choke to death from a lack of oxygen. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
