Counterpunch Weekend Edition
August 23 / 4, 2008
Does the Left Have Anything to Say?
Obamanomics
By JONATHAN M. FELDMAN
Barack Obama, now decrying John McCain's definition of rich people as
those earning five million or more, has a clear populist streak to
his campaign. Obama notes that McCain thinks that "the economy" is
doing well. But what does the term, "the economy" really mean? The
term is often illusive if not confusing. Some simply misuse the
expression "the economy" for their own particular ideological
purposes. The ambiguities attached to the expression create problems
in understanding the presidential debate. There are significant
limits to what so-called "policy analysts" or "experts" have to say
on the matter. This is highly significant because voters now say
that the most important issue in the election is "the economy." It
is not enough to simply argue that more growth and jobs are what make
a good economy, as some (like Left ecologists) debate whether or not
growth in itself is a good thing. If the right is often indifferent
to questions of redistribution and equality, the Left itself
sometimes simply deconstructs the capitalist system. It is evil and
must be transformed. But how can this be done in a way that
translates into a presidential election campaign? We can rant about
outsourcing of jobs and "globalization," but what can we really do
about it all?
Let's start with defining the problem of economics. It's more than
just balancing the "free market" and "the state," supply and demand,
and the markets comprised by consumers, producers and labor. Part of
the "economic problem" is economics itself. In The Economics of
Innocent Fraud, John Kenneth Galbraith says that in seventy years of
working as an economist, he "learned that to be right and useful, one
must accept a continuing divergence between approved belief" or "the
conventional wisdom" and "the reality." The latter, "reality" was
"obscured by social or habitual preference and personal or group
pecuniary advantage in economics and politics." The problem of
elites and their interests colors economics and distorts
it. Galbraith declared that economics could in fact be
"fraudulent." One foundation for this fraud was found in
"traditional economics and its teaching and some from the ritual
views of economic life." These factors not only supported the
particularistic interests of individuals or groups, but also "that of
the more fortunate, articulate and politically prominent in the
larger community." These interests could "achieve the respectability
and authority of everyday knowledge."
full: http://www.counterpunch.com/feldman08232008.html
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
