Of course, you are exaggerating about a hankering for communism, Robert, emanating either from populist movements or from the Vatican. Communitarian values don't equate to ideological communism. There may be Romanticism in the views of some levelers who seek less stratified societies, but when this vision is successfully put in place in some capitalist countries in Europe, you have to recognize that less inequality is more than a dream and that it can also be consistent with general affluence.Robert Tulip wrote: What I find totally fascinating about the collapse of communism is how we are now seeing a recrudescence of an emotional hankering for the communitarian model with the rise of what I like to call “neo-communism”. This is the fantasy mentality that sees neo-liberalism as an evil cabal. Neo-communism uses social media as an echo chamber to construct a vision of politics and economics in conflict with all sensible governments (Zakaria mentions Peru, Brazil, Turkey and others). There is something emotionally satisfying about implicit ideas of class warfare, that the masses will arise and cast off the chains of oppression. Unfortunately this romantic model of politics fails the basics of economics and human motivation, simply placing a different and worse elite in power, since without market discipline you have corruption. But popular myths are characterised by a perverse ability to avoid allowing facts to get in the way of an enticing story.
The really disturbing thing in Australia is that this attitude of hostility to capital and investment, an attitude whose only result can be a one way ticket to Greece, is actually leading in the polls, because Australia has a state owned broadcaster which has been captured by a leftist staff collective who are adamantly hostile to economic reality. This example of Australia’s State Broadcaster illustrates how state power is dangerous and needs to be limited. I hope we can sell off our sheltered workshop state broadcaster. Privatising communications would enforce market discipline and remove the power of ideas that are not backed by responsibility.
The centre of gravity (or maybe I should write center of gravity) in US politics is well to the right of the situation in Australia. A friend of mine recently commented that Australia has a nanny state. Zakaria mentions how this cossetted attitude was rebutted by Margaret Thatcher with her famous slogan “There Is No Alternative”. Unfortunately, we are seeing that there is an alternative to progress and growth, and it its regress and stagnation. The amazing thing is that regressive thinkers like the new Pope of Rome have the brazen impudence to assert that their sentimental obsolete nonsense is good for the poor. I suppose this broad cultural recrudescence of neo-communism is in line with Hitler’s theory that if you tell a big enough lie then people will believe it. Pope Francis is welcome to his dream of all living in poverty, but it is hardly one that he can expect others to share. The danger is that such mentality can gain power, bringing risks of stagnation and conflict. The world cannot afford that.
The Church has always railed against materialism, even as it hypocritically amassed enormous wealth. No doubt as well the current pope sees his views on materialism and the environment--calling for action on GW--as going hand in hand. You yourself believe that economic growth poses no insuperable problem to the environment, but many reasonable people disagree.
I thought FZ was not referring specifically to the income gap of the 1 per cent vs. the 99, but to the large segment not prepared to engage the world that is coming into existence vs. the the small part that knows it's better to emerge from the cocoon that has encased us for as long as we can remember (which in historical perspective is really not a long time). But these two sets do overlap. I think the 1 vs. 99 is a crude way of addressing our problems; it is unfortunately too much based in class envy.Zakaria comments that “there is a growing gap between America’s worldly business elite and cosmopolitan class, on the one hand, and the majority of the American people, on the other.” This situation, identified by Occupy Wall Street as the syndrome of the 1%, illustrates Zakaria’s point about the hollowing out of the American middle class. The frightening reality is that people in India and China are willing to do manufacturing and services jobs for much lower pay than Americans have done them. The upheaval through the creative destruction inherent in the capitalist market system is producing dislocation, envy and tension, but imagining it can be stopped is like trying to stop the tide by the king’s command.
I don't know, Robert, "get out of the way" may have helped us achieve, here in the U.S. cities such as Detroit and St. Louis that we have decided to give up on, hulking wrecks symbolizing our social failures. There has to be some socialism, in my view; that is, government acting to preserve and direct to a degree. Whether that is always efficient may not be the most important thing. France makes huge efforts to support its agricultural industries (including, of course, wine). Do we want this kind of heritage to be swept away through creative destruction?There is no way that things could be made better by policies to prevent free trade. That seems counterintuitive to some who want to protect jobs, but the reality is that if a job needs protection by the state then it is on a path to extinction. Economies have to be robust and innovative, and the dead hand of state protection produces a cossetted and uncompetitive shell that soon becomes ripe for destruction when the subsidies can no longer be afforded. I fear this is a lesson for America’s bloated military.
In any case, allowing jobs to be done by those who are willing to do them for the lowest price is a clear moral requirement of social justice. It is ethically unfair and unprincipled to give work to an uncompetitive firm just because they are your friends, when this means condemning someone in another country to the dire poverty of subsistence agriculture. By opening the economy to competition, innovation is given the opportunity to thrive. We are now seeing amazing firms like Tesla and Google create whole new areas of work in a competitive market. It is exciting to see the buzz around books like Bold by Peter Diamantis. These new models of abundant wealth creation through high technology are very much based on a controversial American saying, get out of my way.
I don't disagree about the futility of government picking economic winners and losers, though.