Loser Liberalism
By Dean Baker (2011)
Progressives need a fundamentally new approach to politics. They have been losing not just because conservatives have so much more money and power, but also because they have accepted the conservatives’ framing of political debates. They have accepted a framing where conservatives want market outcomes whereas liberals want the government to intervene to bring about outcomes that they consider fair.
This is not true. Conservatives rely on the government all the time, most importantly in structuring the market in ways that ensure that income flows upwards. The framing that conservatives like the market while liberals like the government puts liberals in the position of seeming to want to tax the winners to help the losers.
This “loser liberalism” is bad policy and horrible politics. Progressives would be better off fighting battles over the structure of markets so that they don’t redistribute income upward. This book describes some of the key areas where progressives can focus their efforts in restructuring market so that more income flows to the bulk of the working population rather than just a small elite.By releasing The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive under a Creative Commons license and as a free download, Baker walks the walk of one of his key arguments — that copyrights are a form of government intervention in markets that leads to enormous inefficiency, in addition to redistributing income upward. (Hard copies are available for purchase, at cost)
oh, well,
when I say that liberals have bought into the conservative value system, i get hate mail. not sure what Baker gets. but he is more polite than i am so maybe he just gets ignored.
there is this difference however. it seems to me that Baker buys into the conservative value system himself with the idea that money is the supreme good of mankind. and that all the poor need is to find a way to take money from the rich.
here, it seems, he would like to take away the “excess income” that people who have patents or something like (professional) unions to protect their high paying income sources.
there might be some merit in that, but the focus ought to be on illegitimate or predatory ways of making money. there is plenty of criminal-like (only “like, because they make the laws) behavior by some rich people. this should be stopped. it is not at all clear to me that everything “the rich” do needs to be handicapped or relegislated to make them poorer with the idea that somehow that will make the poor richer, and that richer will give their lives more meaning or more happiness.
i tried real hard to be “polite” here, and avoided any metaphors that might be taken wrong by people who hear three words and think they are being insulted. because not only do i not like to be censored, i think that some kinds of censorship will destroy the usefulness of AB and the credibility of one of the more important… though sometimes wrong… voices on my favorite subject.
funny thing is, i ALWAYS do that, but am continually surprised by the way my words are taken by people who don’t think the way i do.
Perhaps the answer is stop framing the argument rich vs poor. The argument should be ending socialism of capitalism which is exactly what is wrong today, with the argument of taxing the rich or savings.
Beene
I no longer have much heart for argument.
I was not a child of the sixties, but a very recent grownup of the sixties and i thought things were working pretty well up to that time… there was great progress in civil rights and poverty. The vietnam war hadn’t started yet… as far as i knew.
My point being that “regulated capitalism” thanks to the New Deal was showing signs of working.
Since then not so much. But the problem does not appear to be “capitalism” or “socialism” or “the rich”… but the rise of a class of very powerful criminals who are of course rich.. who are both stealing from the”poor” and holding down wages and… i think… making it difficult to make progress with the real problem of poverty… though that last, and the failure of democracy to stop those powerful criminals may just be testament to the limitations of human intelligence and decency. (i think most of us are fairly decent until it gets to be hard for us. but there seems to be more just plain evil than i used to think there was.)
and what has taken the heart out of me is the failure or arguments on Angry Bear to go anywhere productive… and to devolve into what looks to me something like neurotic inability to deal with disagreement.
but who am i to cast stones.
Coberly, in this we agree “My point being that “regulated capitalism” thanks to the New Deal was showing signs of working.”
My point is as long as we let neocons and neoliberals define the arguments between capitalism and socialism or tax the rich its a loosing argument. Let those with the skill define capitalism for what it is today. Then reinstitute the reforms that really made this a great nation.
Remember it took 125 years to understand and start the productive regulation of capitalism to serve all people and the nation.
Knowing that no even the poor do not like taxes.
Beene
I do not know about “neoliberals”.. i think they are more criminals dressed up like liberals for the camera
But even during the sixties civil rights and anti war activity, I ran into old time liberals who were still fighting the Revolution of 1848 and saying “the worse it gets the sooner we’ll have “the revolution.” They are still with us, rejecting solutions that will work… help the poor and protect the great progress of Roosevelt’s genius… either because they are so committed to “the revolution” that they genuinely believe “make the rich pay” is THE answer, or because they believe that making things worse… playing into the crazy right’s Big LIe so it will lead to terrible things… will advance “the revolution,” or because they just want to be “one of the big guys.”
Since I’m here anyway, I’ll had that it seems to me that humans… all of us… can in general “hear” or remember only one, one-half, or at most two aspects of a problem, or hear one or two words and fit them into their own projections of obscenity and persecution and react with hate… which they then can’t let go of.
This is of course not completely true of real thinkers working on real problems that they have hope of solving… but even those even when they are honest are severely limited by “what they know.”
Coberly, thanks you’re thoughts.
Hope for genius of another FDR or at least a great humanitarian to lead our nation.