I'm heartened to note an upwelling of support for government, finally, in the blogosphere I read. And heartened to see that the strident defense of Free Market Fundamentalism has waned in the wake of recent market/political aberration and scandal. Here are snips from four recent pieces talking about support for govenment and/or reasons for such support. One is from Paul Krugman, as interviewed by Ezra Klein from The American Prospect suggesting that a new dawn may be breaking for "progressives". One is from George Monboit, framed in the context of the Northern Rock bank meltdown, suggesting that "libertarianism" is a belief-system that can only survive when "perpetually subsidized by responsible citizens" of structured governments. Two are from Douglas Amy, as published on his recently renowned, Government is Good website:
TAP [Ezra Klein] Talks to Paul Krugman, The American Prospect, Oct 25: … EK: … [O]ne of the things you mention [in The Conscience of a Liberal] is that [tmes] have changed, and they've changed in part because the forces that kept egalitarian norms and egalitarian culture in place have dissolved. And to some degree, to put it in Galbraith's terms, the countervailing powers have receded, you don't have the government in the same way, the unions in the same way, you don't have the media channeling outrage on this. But how did we get to the place where we've accepted it?PK: Well I think the outrage is starting to happen now. It takes a while, and part of it is just people … I have the sense that a lot people don't understand how rich the rich are. For the middle-class, it's a lot of the frog in the slowly warming pot syndrome. That year to year the fact that you're falling behind, that you're not getting anywhere despite a growing economy, is not that obvious, and you can chalk it up to your individual experience. But you look back at 35 years of technological progress, rising productivity, and at best arguable gains for the median family, then you can really see it. And the forces at the top are so large that, in a way, they're unimaginable, it's hard to get people focused on it. People at the [NY Times], when I did an article on inequality for the magazine five years ago, and they had artwork illustrating mansions, which I talked about in the article, but what they showed were not. Those were big new McMansions, $3 million dollar, 6,000 square foot homes. But they weren't what the truly rich were building. So people don't have a sense of how far it's gone.
EK: And you talk in the book a lot about political culture, and you touch a little bit on culture culture, but I want to focus on that. We've had "greed is good," Alex Keaton, corporate social responsibility … There's been this real move, not just in the politics and the taxes and so forth, but in the culture, to say, this is ok, even virtuous.
PK: It's the twenties all over again. We can think about what the cultural roots of this would have been, but I think the Great Depression and the war, and the fact that you had a powerful union movement, that forces of equality were big players in the society created a culture where people could say with full-throated voices we did that. …
PK: … [T]here's a progressive movement where there wasn't one before. Clinton came in when the Democratic Party was basically an uncoordinated coalition of people with their own special interests. There is a real progressive movement now. They've learned something from [particularly, the recent health care] debate. …
EK: Toward the end of [The Conscience of a Liberal], you define a liberal as someone who believes in these ideas, and you differentiate that from a progressive as someone who takes action on these ideas. I'm curious where you got that, because I haven't heard it before.
PK: Yeah, it's my own. A lot of people use progressive because liberal has become a bad word, and I don't think that's ultimately a strategy that is going to work, so you might as well adopt the traditional label. But I think in terms of movements a lot. Movement conservatism is a very real force, and movement conservatives, which are by some standards not true conservatives whatever that means. Now we do have a movement, and progressive is mostly used to denote that movement. The American Prospect or the Center for American Progress are clearly progressive movement institutions. That seems to me to be a natural distinction. The values they're exposing are clearly those that have been traditionally associated with liberalism, but the progressive movement is something new. If we had that movement in 1991, as Trent Lott would say, "we wouldn't have all these problems today."
Libertarians are True Social Parasites, George Monboit, Oct 23: … Wherever modern humans, living outside the narrow social mores of the clan, are allowed to pursue their genetic interests without constraint, they will hurt other people. They will grab other people's resources, they will dump their waste in other people's habitats, they will cheat, lie, steal and kill. And if they have power and weapons, no one will be able to stop them except those with more power and better weapons. Our genetic inheritance makes us smart enough to see that when the old society breaks down, we should appease those who are more powerful than ourselves, and exploit those who are less powerful. The survival strategies which once ensured cooperation among equals now ensure subservience to those who have broken the social contract.The democratic challenge, which becomes ever more complex as the scale of human interactions increases, is to mimic the governance system of the small hominid troop. We need a state that rewards us for cooperating and punishes us for cheating and stealing. At the same time we must ensure that the state is also treated like a member of the hominid clan and punished when it acts against the common good. Human welfare, just as it was a million years ago, is guaranteed only by mutual scrutiny and regulation. …
Unless tax-payers' money and public services are available to repair the destruction it causes, libertarianism destroys people's savings, wrecks their lives and trashes their environment. It is the belief system of the free-rider, who is perpetually subsidised by responsible citizens. As biologists we both know what this means. Self-serving as governments might be, the true social parasites are those who demand their dissolution.
Government is Good, Welcome: … This site challenges many of common criticisms of government — that it is massively wasteful, incompetent, the enemy of economic prosperity, etc. An objective examination of the actual record of government reveals that most of these charges are exaggerated, misleading, or simply wrong. This is not to deny that American government has its problems. For one thing, it is certainly not as democratic and accountable as it could be, and special interests have way too much political power. Such problems need to be fixed, and this site identifies several needed reforms. Nonetheless, whatever drawbacks this institution has right now are far outweighed by the enormous benefits that we all enjoy from a vast array of public sector programs. On the whole, government is good.
Government is Good, Introduction: We Need to Stand Up for Government: We need to better understand the indispensable roles that government plays in our society, and we need to come to the defense of this unfairly maligned institution.One reason why conservatives have been winning their ideological war against government is that too few people have been vigorously defending this institution. When was the last time you heard someone offering a positive vision of government — government as a good thing? To their credit, many centrist and liberal politicians have tried to defend various public sector programs — such as environmental protection and Social Security — from the conservative onslaught. But what they have rarely done is to defend the idea that government itself is valuable and beneficial. So while conservatives have been fighting on two fronts — attacking government programs and government itself — the defenders have been fighting back mostly by trying to protect programs. They have not been making the positive case for a healthier and more active public sector. …
This retreat from government must stop. Clearly many centrist and liberal lawmakers understand the valuable and indispensable role that government plays in our society, but they seem to believe that if they too jump on the anti-government band-wagon, this will take the issue away from the conservatives. But this strategy has utterly failed. It has only added fuel to the anti-government fire that Republicans have been stoking for years. Far from abandoning this issue, the right has only pressed harder in their efforts to delegitimize government and create the minimal state. What we need instead is a reasoned and vigorous counter-attack against the anti-government juggernaut — one that champions the vital roles that public sector plays in our society. That is what this website provides — it makes the case that government is good. …
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