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I'm a big fan of Hayek who would be described today as the libertarian counterpart to Keynes, although they agreed on almost everything. If you follow individu

I'm a big fan of Hayek who would be described today as the libertarian counterpart to Keynes, although they agreed on almost everything. If you follow individual liberties to their extreme end, you have cannot have a society as nobody makes sacrifices in personal belief systems, pleasures etc. for one another. You have small warring tribes. If you follow government control to its extreme end, you have perfect communism where nobody has an incentive to work hard and corruption/cronyism cripples the entire system. There always has been, and always will be a balance that swings back and forth along the two extremes. We allowed capitalism to get out of control through deregulation since Reagan and now people are angry because they thought the government was supposed to protect them from corporations (FTC, FDA, SEC) but it did not. So now the pendulum is swinging back in the opposite direction. It's a never ending cycle.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
The Reagan-era "deregulation" was severely overrated. The highlight of the so-called "Golden Age of Capitalism" where supposedly full employment and Keynesian demand management prevailed had, for instance, a Federal Register that was a seventh the size of what it is today. Reagan did pay a lot of lip service to free markets and rugged individualism, but his fiscal record and foreign policy doctrine speak otherwise. It seems to me like a lot of left-leaning commentators have a sort of vested interest in maintaining this pseudohistorical divide between "embedded liberalism" from around 1946-1974 and the "neoliberal" period since then. Many of them never lived through or remembered this period (neither have I), so it serves as a sort of utopian benchmark of hope that we should return to. A more accurate picture to me would be a virtually constant period of state-merchant/corporate coalition since the mercantilist era after the dismantling of feudal relations, to the present. (After all, it was the Golden Age of Capitalism when the Truman Doctrine was in full effect and the United States had some of its greatest foreign policy ventures, a true renaissance for the military-industrial complex.)

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

The Reagan-era "deregulation" was severely overrated. The highlight of the so-called "Golden Age of Capitalism" where supposedly full employment and Keynesian demand management prevailed had, for instance, a Federal Register that was a seventh the size of what it is today. Reagan did pay a lot of lip service to free markets and rugged individualism, but his fiscal record and foreign policy doctrine speak otherwise. It seems to me like a lot of left-leaning commentators have a sort of vested interest in maintaining this pseudohistorical divide between "embedded liberalism" from around 1946-1974 and the "neoliberal" period since then. Many of them never lived through or remembered this period (neither have I), so it serves as a sort of utopian benchmark of hope that we should return to. A more accurate picture to me would be a virtually constant period of state-merchant/corporate coalition since the mercantilist era after the dismantling of feudal relations, to the present. (After all, it was the Golden Age of Capitalism when the Truman Doctrine was in full effect and the United States had some of its greatest foreign policy ventures, a true renaissance for the military-industrial complex.)