Full at
http://blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/2011/10/22/occupy-wall-street-and-the-celebrity-economists/
Here is an excerpt: Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Economics Prize winner and former
president of the World Bank, summed up the liberal view nicely in his remarks
to the OWS occupiers:
You are right to be indignant. The fact is that the system is not working
right. It is not right that we have so many people without jobs when we have so
many needs that we have to fulfill. Its’ not right that we are throwing people
out of their houses when we have so many homeless people. Our financial markets
have an important role to play. They’re supposed to allocate capital, manage
risks. We are bearing the costs of their misdeeds. There’s a system where we’ve
socialized losses and privatized gains. That’s not capitalism; that’s not a
market economy. That’s a distorted economy, and if we continue with that, we
won’t succeed in growing, and we won’t succeed in creating a just society.
Almost every sentence after the first one is wrong. The sentences about the
unemployed and the homeless would be fine on their own, but unfortunately they
follow the one that says that "the system is not working right." How so? It is
working exactly as capitalist systems work. They have always been marked by
poles of wealth and poverty, periods of speculative bubbles followed by
recessions or depressions, overworked employees and reserve armies of labor, a
few winners and many losers, alienating workplaces, the theft of peasant lands,
despoiled environments, in a word, the rule of capital. Losses are always
socialized, and gains are always privatized. It is impossible to create a
society that is both just and capitalist.
D
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