Alive and Well

I actually liked a lot of what was in Anand Giridharadas’s sweeping criticism in the Guardian of the United States (not limited to the United States but actually extending to most of what is called “the West”). I presume it will cause smoke to come out of the ears of some readers. He opens with stating an apparent paradox. Here’s a snippet of it:

The tools for becoming an entrepreneur appear to be more accessible than ever, for the student who learns coding online or the Uber driver – but the share of young people who own a business has fallen by two-thirds since the 1980s. America has birthed both a wildly successful online book superstore, Amazon, and another company, Google, that has scanned more than 25m books for public use – but illiteracy has remained stubbornly in place, and the fraction of Americans who read at least one work of literature a year has dropped by almost a quarter in recent decades. The government has more data at its disposal and more ways of talking and listening to citizens – but only a quarter as many people find it trustworthy as did in the tempestuous 1960s.

It’s lengthy and bruising. I disagree with Mr. Giridharadas’s explanation of the reasons but it’s a strong criticism nonetheless. He’s on shakier ground when it comes to his remarks about “the new elites”:

This genre of elites believes and promotes the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform.

This is what I call MarketWorld – an ascendant power elite defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo.

I am flabbergasted that he doesn’t recognize that these are the same neoliberal policies, dominant in U. S. thought over the period of the last 70 years, that have led to the situation in which we find ourselves now. Clearly, neoliberalism is alive and well.

What I think he misses and what all too many miss is that there are only two ways of allocating resources, whether they be raw materials, labor resources, or any other resource: a command economy or a market economy. Command economies have failed miserably wherever they have been tried.

Before you wrap yourself in the flag and rise in defense of our present system we do not presently have a market economy. We have a form of command economy known as “crony capitalism”. Between state socialism (what most of those presently mounting the rhetorical barricades advocate) and crony capitalism I don’t see a great deal to commend one or the other. They are both institutionalized corruption.

I think we need a major re-engineering of how we organize our affairs but I have no hope that the reorganizations that are likely to take place will be to the good. Command economies will continue to allocate resources inefficiently and (miraculously!) to benefit those in power. I am concerned that at the end of my life the United States will more closely resemble today’s Venezuela than it will today’s Switzerland.