I sometimes wonder whether if pundits avoided strawman arguments they would have any arguments at all. I’m not even going to bother linking to Paul Krugman’s latest NYT column. He’s arguing against more “capitalism”. We do not have a free market system, red in tooth and claw. Pitting your steel against such a mythical beast is a waste of pixels. We also don’t have socialism at least not anything that a socialist worth his salt would recognize as such.
What we have is crony capitalism, a system in which politics is used to redistribute the means of production (mostly money), rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies. It is unquestionably worse than anarcho-capitalism and arguably worse than full-on state socialism.
I think there are some reasonable questions to ask about our system but, sadly, he asks none of them. Here are some of them:
- How would you go about measuring just how capitalist or socialist we are?
- What is the trend?
- Would we be better off if the federal government exerted more influence over the economy, less influence over the economy, or just operated differently?
- If differently, how?
- Is there a feasible path with measurable milestones for accomplishing what you wish to accomplish?
I would argue the most “objective” way to measure more/less socialism/capitalism would be the rate of self-employment and worker-ownership (to me worker-owned is just a term for group self-employment.) Capitalism as discussed by classical economists like Adam Smith doesn’t exist today, and I have a suspicion Krugman has never read past the first book in Wealth of Nations and is unaware of the necessary conditions for a free market and functional invisible hand.
Either way you go, for free markets or socialism, they lead to a diminishing role both for governments and bosses.
Just as a casual observation, more anarcho-capitalism would be compatible with the sort of syndicalism that you advocate. More state socialism (which I infer is what Dr. Krugman would prefer) would be incompatible with the sort of syndicalism that you advocate. We can be confident of that because that’s what has happened in the past.