A FEW WORDS FROM ATRIOS,
PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS

Atrios, a.k.a. Dr. Duncan Black, the blogger behind the always fab Eschaton blog, is an economist by training, and actually taught the subject for a few years before his blog became so big and influential that he was able to go professional. Of course, his blog covers much more than economics, and covers it well, but when he takes the time to write an essay on some sort of economic issue, it's always worth the read.

Like Tuesday, for instance:

Theory and Practice

The move towards privatization in the federal government has just caused the federal government to turn into a massive patronage machine, with no decent oversight of federal contracts and a lack of genuine competitive bidding. "Free trade" has done nothing either for most of the people of Mexico - where inequality has risen - nor the people of this country - where median wages have been stagnant and inequality continues to rise. Telecom and energy deregulation have pretty much had the impacts that critics argued at the time.

In other words, almost the entire economic package of sensible liberals in the 80s and 90s has been for shit, at best benefitting few and not hurting too many people. Part of the reason is that many of these things were con games. "Free trade" isn't really free trade - much of trade is still not free, and much of what is put under its banner has nothing to do with it - telecom and energy deregulation aren't really deregulation, but re-regulation benefitting existing interests, etc... The devil is in the details in these things, and the most dedicated proponents of such things in the popular press are happy to stop at the bumper sticker - Free Trade! Free Market! - without bothering to understand that the policies are actually much more complicated than that.

Click here for the rest.

In other words, for close to a couple of decades now, there has been very little relationship between public discourse on economics and reality. Indeed, most of the 90s rhetoric on the issue was simple cheerleading for neoliberalism coupled with asserting the insanity of free trade detractors--for a while there, business magazines were portraying successful executives, quite literally sometimes, as superheroes on their covers, and late 90s free trade protesters were routinely portrayed in countless essays as being utterly irrational.

Now, it's obvious that I disagree with quite a bit of what the neoliberals assert, and I feel confident that a real debate would make clear how such economic philosophy is extraordinarily dangerous, in both the short and long runs, to the vast majority of Americans. But, to the best of my knowledge, we've never had that debate. Instead, both the mainstream news media and the political class have simply accepted the neoliberal point of view and acted accordingly. Meanwhile, the rich have gotten richer while prospects for most everybody else have become ever more grim.

In fact, things are so grim that former Treasury Secretary and current Citigroup baron Robert Rubin, who is just about as neoliberal as they come, is now worried about the direction we're going in, and is taking steps to lessen the inevitable voter backlash. Yes, we're in that much trouble. Unfortunately, most of Rubin's colleagues don't appear to have his powers of prognostication, and I greatly fear that within a decade or so, the US will be facing a serious economic collapse. And that's going to hurt. Bad.

But the free trade song and dance continues, blissfully unaware of the looming storm. If there's any justice, these fools will be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes.

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