Typical how a hater wedge like Greenspan did the things to help keep White Power in Power.
Why does it have to be about race and class? Because the White Establishment IS racist and classist. That's what any objective review of U.S. gov't policy shows us.
Since DAY ONE in America virtually every single economic policy is really about race and classism. U.S. guvmint economic policy has always benefited and empowered the White Establishment over the working class and people of color in particular. My entire life White Establishmentarians have been pissin' on my leg and telling me It's raining - telling me White Establishmentarian policies benefit the working class, when in fact U.S. gov't economic policies have always benefited the wealthy, the top 1%.
Even today CNN, MSNBC, ABCNEWS, CBSNEWS trot out so-called economic experts who shamelessly gaslight the middle class and poor by blaming so-called inflation and high gasoline prices on Democrats passing pandemic relief bills and lazy workers not going back to their shitty pre-pandemic jobs for cheap pre-pandemic wages. I tell business owners who complain about the unavailability of cheap pre-pandemic labor: You have no constitutional, moral or statutory right to cheap labor period. If you cannot pay your workers a living wage then you have a FAILED BUSINESS and it's time for the business owner to get a job or sell their assets.
Totally agree with your assessment. I live in Alaska, a very red and a 100% oil state (plus massive federal govt subsidies that most people do not know about). Along with Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Kansas, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and a few other petroleum producing states, they are all majority GOP controlled and have been for many years. Since more than 90% of US petroleum production is from these GOP states, the fault of todays high gas price at the pump is 100% the fault of these GOP controlled states.
Ayn Rand, the character-steeling effects of endless competition, the prize belongs to the swiftest — no wonder Click and Clack called him “Alan Greasepan.”
Thanks Robert for publishing what your conversation with Greenspan could have been like.
Any discussion of the Fed Chair wouldn't be complete without reminding people how Sen. Bernie Sanders grilled Fed Chair Ben Bernanke like grilled cheese. Bernie went after Bernanke with a meat cleaver, painting Bernanke into a corner and forcing Bernanke to tell the truth under oath.
Bernie forced Bernanke to admit on video under oath the following:
1) Forced Bernanke to admit that Fed Chair Bernanke, like other Fed Chairs, create trillions of dollars out of thin air by literally sitting at Bernanke's keyboard and adding zeros to digits to create money out of thin air.
2) Forced Bernanke to admit the Federal Reserve has lent trillions of U.S. dollars to U.S. banks and worldwide WITHOUT REVEALING WHO THE FEDERAL RESERVE LENT U.S. DOLLARS TO!
3) Forced Bernanke to brazenly and openly admit to Bernie and the public that Bernanke WILL NOT REVEAL WHO THE FED LENT THAT MONEY TO!
4) Bernanke told Bernie that he would not reveal who the FED lent trillions to because it could possibly upset world markets. Bernie reminded Bernanke that he was under oath and must tell Congress who the FED lent money to. Bernie asked Bernanke, "Will you tell the American people to whom you lent $2.2 trillion of their dollars. Will you tell us who got that money and what the terms are of those agreements?" Bernanke refused to tell Bernie and Congress to whom the Fed lent $2.2 trillion of U.S. tax dollars. When pressed further by Bernie, Bernanke said the Fed lent it to hundreds and hundreds of banks. Bernie asked Bernanke which banks did you lend the money to? Bernanke flatly stated, "NO."
Odd how a man that is SUPPOSED to be so brilliant and yet be an acolyte of Ayn Rand, nee Rosenbaum. When I heard Greenspan speak, I had the sense that he was speaking cryptically so as to obfuscate. Once a congressman on a committee responded to A.G.'s words with, "I can't understand you." I thought: yeah, neither can I; and, I was an economics major! Brilliance without a heart does not belong in govt. Give me Dean Baker any day. What this teaches us is this: We need presidents who have some depth of understanding of the murky world of Economics so that they do not fall prey to advisors with limited agendas as, in my view, President Clinton did when he signed off on the repeal of Glass-Steagall. A.G. was a bit of a fraud, if not an educated fool. G-B-L at work.. (Govt By Lobby)
Extremely well-said, Carlos: " Brilliance without a heart does not belong in govt." I always felt that however 'smart' and supposedly competent Greenspan was said to be, he did seem to lack a heart as well as any feeling for average Americans. He sought status and deference, and was totally all about himself, reflecting the very worst that we can run into in people who have been given or achieved great power.
Professor Reich, from that imaginary discussion it sounds like you think that our government answers to the Fed rather than the American People:
Greenspan: “I could do worse. He’ll reappoint me. He’ll do whatever I want to him to.”
Is this a desirable state of affairs? The Fed was created to keep our immoral fractional reserve banking system solvent by creating money, a Faustian bargain entered by Congress, because Congress wanted the Fed to create money for their programs too, and the Fed happily obliges – and charges taxpayers interest for the privilege. Congress and the President answer to the banks, not to the people.
Why should the United States government beg the Fed chairman for anything? Why not abolish the Fed, let the banks fend for themselves like everybody else has to do, and then slash military spending to balance the budget so that we can enact the programs our people who are working so hard so desperately need, programs that every other developed nation has? This would not be socialism, it would be social justice.
Socialism and social justice are not the same and should never be conflated. Bernie Sanders and AOC are some of my very favorite people in Congress, but it annoys me to no end when they keep calling themselves “socialists”. They are fighting for social justice not for socialism.
The Nobel prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek defined socialism as government control over manufacturing and production. In this sense, the institution of the Fed is profoundly socialist, because they control the money supply. They set the interest rates that signal manufacturing and production across the country. So the United States is not really a capitalist country at all, it is deeply and profoundly socialist because the government and banks control the money supply through the strange and immoral symbiosis of central banking.
For the United States to become a true democracy and to become truly capitalist, the money has to be controlled by the people, not by the banks. Let the banks fend for themselves, and force Congress to face the American people when they bloat the military budget and then refuse to treat healthcare as a human right, while inflating away everybody’s savings behind their backs. Get rid of the Fed!
We needed the Federal Reserve when we pulled in all the Gold Coins that used to be traded in commerce and replaced them with worthless paper money. Stability and worldwide acceptance of the US dollar depends on the POWER of the Fed to back up it's printed money and treasury bonds. 150 years ago, we coined US Trade Dollar from .999 pure silver in order to get acceptance of our dollars in Asia. Today they want crisp, new $100.00 bills with water marks and magnetic strips to guarantee the money is real and not printed in North Korea. In 1964 France wanted the 1 billion US dollars, they had in their banks, to be redeemed in GOLD and the USA went off the Gold Standard and all the silver coins we had in circulation disappeared into hoarders and collectors Safe Deposit Boxes and we had a coin shortage and after that only the 50 cent piece had any silver in it at all as silver bullion prices also soared. When Gold was in circulation, the people had the power in their pockets because they held the GOLD and SILVER. With Paper money, the Federal Reserve now holds that power.
I can't attempt a thoughtful reply, for I'm still laughing 😂 over serious matters. Yet seventy-eight years of living provides a long-view. Our economic problems border on the mystical, not mysterious (to me), and have happened before. Then, we straighten up and fly right. It will happen again, and as a nation, we'll fall once more. So, what else is new? I love your almost-irreverent humor! Thank you for this gem. Most importantly, Happy Hanukkah, Robert, which begins tomorrow, yes? (Rhetorical, no need to respond.) 🕎
What I don't sense in this pseudo-conversation is any grasp in Greenspan of the evolving nature of capitalism. For example when the Fed and Obama bailed out the banks in 2008-2009 with massive amounts of liquidity the Obama administration rejected fiscal stimulus on the same level and the economy stagnated. In the current Covid crisis both the Trump and Biden administrations used extensive fiscal stimulus together with even more massive pumping of liquidity into the banking system. Now we are seeing the reaction with greedy monopolies and the Saudi medieval killers raising prices because they can(all those construction materials prices have gone back up in price in the last month enormously, but it's Fall and where is the demand?), and the bond buyers and bankers mourning the Fed's not raising interest rates to impose austerity. So something has happened here---more liquidity for the banks and Wall St than ever before and more fiscal stimulus than in the last crisis. American capitalism still has a problem. It appears to be unable to trim speculation from its investment process whereas the Chinese are working on this. The Chinese also appear to be able to complete capital projects with an efficiency that we don't have. Remember that they shut down the Covid epidemic very effectively using the State planning mechanism whereas we haven't even been able to convince our population to get vaccinated or wear the shoddy masks we never improved through regulation or filter air in enclosed spaces.
So whereas our form of capitalism is evolving it appears to be doing so at a snails pace and the Chinese appear to be pioneering the next level of evolution of the capitalist system.
Any evolution of American capitalism is on rather shaky ground as the GQP has a tendency to undo any good the Dems have done, once they're back in power. And I wouldn't point to the Chinese as pioneers in the evolution of the capitalist system because their system is based on total state control of not only the economy but of all major and many minor industries. That alliance - willing on the part of the dictatorship but covertly unwilling on the part of many of the captive companies that form key industries - is better called fascism, not capitalism, and reminiscent of the government-corporation nexus of Hitlerian corporatism, most often called fascism.
The Chinese operate a state capitalist model but the state doesn’t operate for the sole benefit of corporate profits and is not fascism where the interests of the workers are completely subordinate to the profit making demands of capital and the vanguard party controlling the state acts to violently repress worker demands. The Chinese firmly believe their Communist Party is holding state power for the benefit of the working class. It is the Leninist model and quite primitive. Will it evolve capitalism into something better? It’s worth looking at objectively over the next few decades. Is it appropriate for an advanced capitalist economy like ours? No. But we are in the process of deteriorating into classical fascism rather than marching forward into social democracy.
"the state doesn’t operate for the sole benefit of corporate profits and is not fascism where the interests of the workers are completely subordinate to the profit making demands of capital and the vanguard party controlling the state acts to violently repress worker demands. "
I must disagree. German fascism did lip service to the interests of the workers but the regime always had its own interests and goals first in the relationship which they forged with German corporations; the workers got patriotic hoo-hah. It's essentially the same in China, with the exception of recent government demands for an increased financial contribution from the corporations to the regime. There are few to no worker strikes or evidence of workers demanding better pay or working conditions, because that simply isn't allowed. I'll agree that the average Chinese probably does feel that the Party is working for increased benefit to the working class, and all Han Chinese. Whether it's actually the case is another matter, and China is the last place I'd look for the future of capitalism.
Well I don’t think capitalism has a future. The ruthless exploitation of nature, the demand for immediate profit, the kill or be killed competition, capitalism is about to destroy the planet with global warming. Capitalism is an economic system we have to outgrow.
As to China I expect them to hit the rocks with capitalism the way England hit the rocks with feudalism—first. Let’s hope we don’t haul up the rear like Czarist Russia.
The primary goal of capitalism is to make a profit for the capitalist, and the bigger the profit, the better — right? I can’t see improvement to the spirit of capitalism that doesn’t include the diminution of the profit motive in favor of sharing the wealth with all stakeholders. Is this what you mean by “evolution of the capitalist system”?
The evolution I am thinking of here is not production for use rather than production for profit, which would be a stage of socialism. Capitalism cannot evolve there.
I am thinking of Keynes who clearly stated that at a certain level of production in the evolution of capitalism so much surplus wealth is produced that the survival instincts of the greedy profit seeking capitalist would be anathema to society. Their greediness would become excessive.
For example today we have a bunch of billionaires trying to commercialize getting to Mars and a weak State that cannot allocated the $60billion of capital necessary to vaccinate everyone on the planet against SARS-CoV-2. So obviously there is a cultural problem here where the masses haven't woken up to the fact that their survival is contingent not on adopting the values of their employers---maximize profit, but upon allocating that capital more efficiency to production so that they get the benefits necessary to survive.
The predicate of any evolution of capitalism is the State being in the hands of a politically conscious working class.
Think of what happened to feudalism where in the battles between the house of York and the house of Lancaster you could leave 16,000 bloody corpses hacked to pieces on the battlefield in one day. This is what the feudal lords guaranteed their followers. Taking your neighbors property by force. Not much of a reward compared to the increase of wealth and production that came about with the triumph of capitalism.
Eventually the aristocrats, the beneficiaries of the feudal system, themselves recognized industrialization created more wealth than farming and joined in.
So today our out of control billionaires need to be reigned in by the State before they leave our bloodied corpses on the modern battlefield. Even Bezos thanked his peasants for slaving hard at the warehouse so he could ride into space. Maybe enough people will wake up to the understanding that it doesn't have to be this way.
And to think, what if the Fed raised the minimum wage to $18.75 and all those "Spaced Out" billionaires had to pay their workers a living wage and then had to offer benefits to keep them from going to the other billionaire's sweat shops? What if all those minions decided to check the YES box on their unionization cards?
Edward: In my view, you brilliantly have captured the distinction between a raw brute form of capitalism, wherein everyday people suffer its worst consequences vs. capitalism that is wedded to social democratic institutions, “which contain its excesses, moderate its contradictions… [and] give it a human face.” (Source: Former Distinguished Fellow at Demos Benjamin R. Barber)
Greenspan "deftly avoided talking about the deficit, jobs and inflation." How nice of him. He surely knew you had no interest in discussing those subjects with him. He didn't want to bore you. Either that, or he's a snake.
No doubt he's very, very smart. But he turned out to be not as smart as he thought. After the 2008 financial crisis and the resulting economic devastation, he admitted he had gone too far with his Ayn Rand free-market philosophy and opposition to government regulations. And the Clintons and other corporate Dems, not to mention Republicans, had gone too far right along with him, taking the country into the Great Recession.
Professor, if only this conversation with Greenspan had actually occurred just as you've presented it here, it might have done some good and hopefully pointed Greenspan toward a self-examination of his basic character and personality flaws that over the years caused so many people so much suffering. I never could stand the guy, his having to always be right, his total self-absorption and his arrogance, his fawning for deference, also the tragedy of his being in a position from which he could wreak untold damage on American life. We're so much better off without him. He was indeed, as you put it, a "robber-baron pimp", and probably much worse.
OMG! This is hilarious! Robber baron? Bolshevik dwarf? I’ll trust your take on this (I’m a biologist and nurse, not an economist) that we will do OK if Powell is retained.
I laughed my a.. off! You are so funny! Self effacing and so smart! Greenspan did finally come to his senses! This would have been an honest conversation!
Typical how a hater wedge like Greenspan did the things to help keep White Power in Power.
Why does it have to be about race and class? Because the White Establishment IS racist and classist. That's what any objective review of U.S. gov't policy shows us.
Since DAY ONE in America virtually every single economic policy is really about race and classism. U.S. guvmint economic policy has always benefited and empowered the White Establishment over the working class and people of color in particular. My entire life White Establishmentarians have been pissin' on my leg and telling me It's raining - telling me White Establishmentarian policies benefit the working class, when in fact U.S. gov't economic policies have always benefited the wealthy, the top 1%.
Even today CNN, MSNBC, ABCNEWS, CBSNEWS trot out so-called economic experts who shamelessly gaslight the middle class and poor by blaming so-called inflation and high gasoline prices on Democrats passing pandemic relief bills and lazy workers not going back to their shitty pre-pandemic jobs for cheap pre-pandemic wages. I tell business owners who complain about the unavailability of cheap pre-pandemic labor: You have no constitutional, moral or statutory right to cheap labor period. If you cannot pay your workers a living wage then you have a FAILED BUSINESS and it's time for the business owner to get a job or sell their assets.
Totally agree with your assessment. I live in Alaska, a very red and a 100% oil state (plus massive federal govt subsidies that most people do not know about). Along with Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Kansas, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and a few other petroleum producing states, they are all majority GOP controlled and have been for many years. Since more than 90% of US petroleum production is from these GOP states, the fault of todays high gas price at the pump is 100% the fault of these GOP controlled states.
Ayn Rand, the character-steeling effects of endless competition, the prize belongs to the swiftest — no wonder Click and Clack called him “Alan Greasepan.”
Thanks Robert for publishing what your conversation with Greenspan could have been like.
Any discussion of the Fed Chair wouldn't be complete without reminding people how Sen. Bernie Sanders grilled Fed Chair Ben Bernanke like grilled cheese. Bernie went after Bernanke with a meat cleaver, painting Bernanke into a corner and forcing Bernanke to tell the truth under oath.
Bernie forced Bernanke to admit on video under oath the following:
1) Forced Bernanke to admit that Fed Chair Bernanke, like other Fed Chairs, create trillions of dollars out of thin air by literally sitting at Bernanke's keyboard and adding zeros to digits to create money out of thin air.
2) Forced Bernanke to admit the Federal Reserve has lent trillions of U.S. dollars to U.S. banks and worldwide WITHOUT REVEALING WHO THE FEDERAL RESERVE LENT U.S. DOLLARS TO!
3) Forced Bernanke to brazenly and openly admit to Bernie and the public that Bernanke WILL NOT REVEAL WHO THE FED LENT THAT MONEY TO!
4) Bernanke told Bernie that he would not reveal who the FED lent trillions to because it could possibly upset world markets. Bernie reminded Bernanke that he was under oath and must tell Congress who the FED lent money to. Bernie asked Bernanke, "Will you tell the American people to whom you lent $2.2 trillion of their dollars. Will you tell us who got that money and what the terms are of those agreements?" Bernanke refused to tell Bernie and Congress to whom the Fed lent $2.2 trillion of U.S. tax dollars. When pressed further by Bernie, Bernanke said the Fed lent it to hundreds and hundreds of banks. Bernie asked Bernanke which banks did you lend the money to? Bernanke flatly stated, "NO."
You can bet it wasn't the middle class and poor.
Don't think so? Here's the video: https://youtu.be/dX2qvbznGKM
thank you for posting this, Ron Harold.
Odd how a man that is SUPPOSED to be so brilliant and yet be an acolyte of Ayn Rand, nee Rosenbaum. When I heard Greenspan speak, I had the sense that he was speaking cryptically so as to obfuscate. Once a congressman on a committee responded to A.G.'s words with, "I can't understand you." I thought: yeah, neither can I; and, I was an economics major! Brilliance without a heart does not belong in govt. Give me Dean Baker any day. What this teaches us is this: We need presidents who have some depth of understanding of the murky world of Economics so that they do not fall prey to advisors with limited agendas as, in my view, President Clinton did when he signed off on the repeal of Glass-Steagall. A.G. was a bit of a fraud, if not an educated fool. G-B-L at work.. (Govt By Lobby)
Extremely well-said, Carlos: " Brilliance without a heart does not belong in govt." I always felt that however 'smart' and supposedly competent Greenspan was said to be, he did seem to lack a heart as well as any feeling for average Americans. He sought status and deference, and was totally all about himself, reflecting the very worst that we can run into in people who have been given or achieved great power.
Add, for other reasons than economics, to your list, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, John Eastman and John Yoo for example.
I agree, just because you can does not mean you should.
Politics is really harsh and ugly; you could be in comedy. xo
Thank you, Melissa. I see a lot of comedy in politics.
That’s because so many politicians are jokes.
I love the way you share it!
Professor Reich, from that imaginary discussion it sounds like you think that our government answers to the Fed rather than the American People:
Greenspan: “I could do worse. He’ll reappoint me. He’ll do whatever I want to him to.”
Is this a desirable state of affairs? The Fed was created to keep our immoral fractional reserve banking system solvent by creating money, a Faustian bargain entered by Congress, because Congress wanted the Fed to create money for their programs too, and the Fed happily obliges – and charges taxpayers interest for the privilege. Congress and the President answer to the banks, not to the people.
Why should the United States government beg the Fed chairman for anything? Why not abolish the Fed, let the banks fend for themselves like everybody else has to do, and then slash military spending to balance the budget so that we can enact the programs our people who are working so hard so desperately need, programs that every other developed nation has? This would not be socialism, it would be social justice.
Socialism and social justice are not the same and should never be conflated. Bernie Sanders and AOC are some of my very favorite people in Congress, but it annoys me to no end when they keep calling themselves “socialists”. They are fighting for social justice not for socialism.
The Nobel prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek defined socialism as government control over manufacturing and production. In this sense, the institution of the Fed is profoundly socialist, because they control the money supply. They set the interest rates that signal manufacturing and production across the country. So the United States is not really a capitalist country at all, it is deeply and profoundly socialist because the government and banks control the money supply through the strange and immoral symbiosis of central banking.
For the United States to become a true democracy and to become truly capitalist, the money has to be controlled by the people, not by the banks. Let the banks fend for themselves, and force Congress to face the American people when they bloat the military budget and then refuse to treat healthcare as a human right, while inflating away everybody’s savings behind their backs. Get rid of the Fed!
We needed the Federal Reserve when we pulled in all the Gold Coins that used to be traded in commerce and replaced them with worthless paper money. Stability and worldwide acceptance of the US dollar depends on the POWER of the Fed to back up it's printed money and treasury bonds. 150 years ago, we coined US Trade Dollar from .999 pure silver in order to get acceptance of our dollars in Asia. Today they want crisp, new $100.00 bills with water marks and magnetic strips to guarantee the money is real and not printed in North Korea. In 1964 France wanted the 1 billion US dollars, they had in their banks, to be redeemed in GOLD and the USA went off the Gold Standard and all the silver coins we had in circulation disappeared into hoarders and collectors Safe Deposit Boxes and we had a coin shortage and after that only the 50 cent piece had any silver in it at all as silver bullion prices also soared. When Gold was in circulation, the people had the power in their pockets because they held the GOLD and SILVER. With Paper money, the Federal Reserve now holds that power.
This background on gold and silver is helpful.
That’s really instructive! Thanks.
I can't attempt a thoughtful reply, for I'm still laughing 😂 over serious matters. Yet seventy-eight years of living provides a long-view. Our economic problems border on the mystical, not mysterious (to me), and have happened before. Then, we straighten up and fly right. It will happen again, and as a nation, we'll fall once more. So, what else is new? I love your almost-irreverent humor! Thank you for this gem. Most importantly, Happy Hanukkah, Robert, which begins tomorrow, yes? (Rhetorical, no need to respond.) 🕎
What I don't sense in this pseudo-conversation is any grasp in Greenspan of the evolving nature of capitalism. For example when the Fed and Obama bailed out the banks in 2008-2009 with massive amounts of liquidity the Obama administration rejected fiscal stimulus on the same level and the economy stagnated. In the current Covid crisis both the Trump and Biden administrations used extensive fiscal stimulus together with even more massive pumping of liquidity into the banking system. Now we are seeing the reaction with greedy monopolies and the Saudi medieval killers raising prices because they can(all those construction materials prices have gone back up in price in the last month enormously, but it's Fall and where is the demand?), and the bond buyers and bankers mourning the Fed's not raising interest rates to impose austerity. So something has happened here---more liquidity for the banks and Wall St than ever before and more fiscal stimulus than in the last crisis. American capitalism still has a problem. It appears to be unable to trim speculation from its investment process whereas the Chinese are working on this. The Chinese also appear to be able to complete capital projects with an efficiency that we don't have. Remember that they shut down the Covid epidemic very effectively using the State planning mechanism whereas we haven't even been able to convince our population to get vaccinated or wear the shoddy masks we never improved through regulation or filter air in enclosed spaces.
So whereas our form of capitalism is evolving it appears to be doing so at a snails pace and the Chinese appear to be pioneering the next level of evolution of the capitalist system.
Any evolution of American capitalism is on rather shaky ground as the GQP has a tendency to undo any good the Dems have done, once they're back in power. And I wouldn't point to the Chinese as pioneers in the evolution of the capitalist system because their system is based on total state control of not only the economy but of all major and many minor industries. That alliance - willing on the part of the dictatorship but covertly unwilling on the part of many of the captive companies that form key industries - is better called fascism, not capitalism, and reminiscent of the government-corporation nexus of Hitlerian corporatism, most often called fascism.
The Chinese operate a state capitalist model but the state doesn’t operate for the sole benefit of corporate profits and is not fascism where the interests of the workers are completely subordinate to the profit making demands of capital and the vanguard party controlling the state acts to violently repress worker demands. The Chinese firmly believe their Communist Party is holding state power for the benefit of the working class. It is the Leninist model and quite primitive. Will it evolve capitalism into something better? It’s worth looking at objectively over the next few decades. Is it appropriate for an advanced capitalist economy like ours? No. But we are in the process of deteriorating into classical fascism rather than marching forward into social democracy.
"the state doesn’t operate for the sole benefit of corporate profits and is not fascism where the interests of the workers are completely subordinate to the profit making demands of capital and the vanguard party controlling the state acts to violently repress worker demands. "
I must disagree. German fascism did lip service to the interests of the workers but the regime always had its own interests and goals first in the relationship which they forged with German corporations; the workers got patriotic hoo-hah. It's essentially the same in China, with the exception of recent government demands for an increased financial contribution from the corporations to the regime. There are few to no worker strikes or evidence of workers demanding better pay or working conditions, because that simply isn't allowed. I'll agree that the average Chinese probably does feel that the Party is working for increased benefit to the working class, and all Han Chinese. Whether it's actually the case is another matter, and China is the last place I'd look for the future of capitalism.
Well I don’t think capitalism has a future. The ruthless exploitation of nature, the demand for immediate profit, the kill or be killed competition, capitalism is about to destroy the planet with global warming. Capitalism is an economic system we have to outgrow.
As to China I expect them to hit the rocks with capitalism the way England hit the rocks with feudalism—first. Let’s hope we don’t haul up the rear like Czarist Russia.
The primary goal of capitalism is to make a profit for the capitalist, and the bigger the profit, the better — right? I can’t see improvement to the spirit of capitalism that doesn’t include the diminution of the profit motive in favor of sharing the wealth with all stakeholders. Is this what you mean by “evolution of the capitalist system”?
The evolution I am thinking of here is not production for use rather than production for profit, which would be a stage of socialism. Capitalism cannot evolve there.
I am thinking of Keynes who clearly stated that at a certain level of production in the evolution of capitalism so much surplus wealth is produced that the survival instincts of the greedy profit seeking capitalist would be anathema to society. Their greediness would become excessive.
For example today we have a bunch of billionaires trying to commercialize getting to Mars and a weak State that cannot allocated the $60billion of capital necessary to vaccinate everyone on the planet against SARS-CoV-2. So obviously there is a cultural problem here where the masses haven't woken up to the fact that their survival is contingent not on adopting the values of their employers---maximize profit, but upon allocating that capital more efficiency to production so that they get the benefits necessary to survive.
The predicate of any evolution of capitalism is the State being in the hands of a politically conscious working class.
Think of what happened to feudalism where in the battles between the house of York and the house of Lancaster you could leave 16,000 bloody corpses hacked to pieces on the battlefield in one day. This is what the feudal lords guaranteed their followers. Taking your neighbors property by force. Not much of a reward compared to the increase of wealth and production that came about with the triumph of capitalism.
Eventually the aristocrats, the beneficiaries of the feudal system, themselves recognized industrialization created more wealth than farming and joined in.
So today our out of control billionaires need to be reigned in by the State before they leave our bloodied corpses on the modern battlefield. Even Bezos thanked his peasants for slaving hard at the warehouse so he could ride into space. Maybe enough people will wake up to the understanding that it doesn't have to be this way.
And to think, what if the Fed raised the minimum wage to $18.75 and all those "Spaced Out" billionaires had to pay their workers a living wage and then had to offer benefits to keep them from going to the other billionaire's sweat shops? What if all those minions decided to check the YES box on their unionization cards?
Edward: In my view, you brilliantly have captured the distinction between a raw brute form of capitalism, wherein everyday people suffer its worst consequences vs. capitalism that is wedded to social democratic institutions, “which contain its excesses, moderate its contradictions… [and] give it a human face.” (Source: Former Distinguished Fellow at Demos Benjamin R. Barber)
Great "imagined" conversation with Alan Greenspan - made me subscribe today
Thanks, Leslie.
Haha! It’s good to laugh! Happy to see your sense of humor.
Hmmm ok but what was for lunch... :)
I don't recall, but it was more lavish than anything produced in the Labor Department's cafeteria or the White House mess.
Love your content... It's important... Thank you!
Greenspan "deftly avoided talking about the deficit, jobs and inflation." How nice of him. He surely knew you had no interest in discussing those subjects with him. He didn't want to bore you. Either that, or he's a snake.
No doubt he's very, very smart. But he turned out to be not as smart as he thought. After the 2008 financial crisis and the resulting economic devastation, he admitted he had gone too far with his Ayn Rand free-market philosophy and opposition to government regulations. And the Clintons and other corporate Dems, not to mention Republicans, had gone too far right along with him, taking the country into the Great Recession.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna27335454
Professor, if only this conversation with Greenspan had actually occurred just as you've presented it here, it might have done some good and hopefully pointed Greenspan toward a self-examination of his basic character and personality flaws that over the years caused so many people so much suffering. I never could stand the guy, his having to always be right, his total self-absorption and his arrogance, his fawning for deference, also the tragedy of his being in a position from which he could wreak untold damage on American life. We're so much better off without him. He was indeed, as you put it, a "robber-baron pimp", and probably much worse.
OMG! This is hilarious! Robber baron? Bolshevik dwarf? I’ll trust your take on this (I’m a biologist and nurse, not an economist) that we will do OK if Powell is retained.
I laughed my a.. off! You are so funny! Self effacing and so smart! Greenspan did finally come to his senses! This would have been an honest conversation!
Very entertaining informative and, most likely true!