Rob Schaap wrote:
>Yeah, Doug, but is it appropriate to discuss unemployment and poverty in
>such parochial terms?
Yes I know all this. I write about it a lot even. What stuns me,
though, is the apparent inability of left economists to acknowledge
that some half-decent things have happened to the U.S. working class
over the last 5 years - higher wages, more secure jobs, fewer in
poverty, a narrowing of the racial income gap - things we've been
agitating for for decades. Instead of acknowledging this and asking
why it happened and if and how it could be sustained and/or spread
about elsewhere, we hear about tremors and vulnerabilities. And
according to standard Keynesian doctrine, this expansion shouldn't
have happened, but it has. Yet there's little effort to think about
why.
There's an old Christian heresy - Malebranche is it? - that holds
that God destined Adam & Eve to fall so that He could have the
satisfying mission of saving us. I'm tempted to think that lots of
lefties cherish disaster so that they can be the secular saviors.
But what do I know, I never get out.
Doug
