Perry L. Gardner: Private Journal #6
Friday, March 4, 1988
It is time to take the Economic Illusion back to the library. Sub-title: “False Choices between Prosperity and Social Justice”. We can have a just society and a dynamic economy. It is a political choice, but today the conservative conventional wisdom is denying the choice. Sweden, Norway, Austria, West Germany have all demonstrated it can be done. Keynes is not an outmoded mentor.
Quotes:
“Study economics to avoid being deceived by economists.”—Joan Robinson.
“The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: Economic Efficiency, Social Justice, and Individual Liberty.”—John Maynard Keynes, 1925.
“The distribution of wealth and income is a political choice, there is little reason to tolerate the gross injustices that exist today; and laissez-faire must find another ethical basis to justify its brutal medicine.”—Robert Kuttner.
Key Words: Social contracts, positive-sum bargains, social democratic Europe, equality/efficiency bargains.
Socializing income without socializing productive capital has its limits, welfare vs. entitlements. Full employment is the best means of reconciling economic justice with economic growth.
“Redistribution of wealth and income do not necessarily depress savings and investment. Politically allocated investment can be more efficient than laissez-faire.”
Chapter 3, TRADE, reconsiders the holiest ground of Laissez-Faire economics, free trade. It finds that free trade, within limits, promotes efficiency and growth; but that “anarchic trade and excessively mobile private capital recreates the worst dilemmas of 19th century capitalism: falling wages and competitive deflation—with severe consequences for both equality and efficiency.”
“The authority of the market can be as coercive as that of the state”, and where is freedom then?
“Full blooded Keynesianism—substantial redistribution, social control over investment capital, and full employment—would transform power relationships utterly.”—revolutionary implications. Put people to work and restore demand!
J.M. Keynes—”What we need now is not to button up our waistcoats tight, but be in a mood of expansion, of activity—to do things, to buy things, to make things, surely all this is the most obvious common sense…”—wealth vs. commonwealth—we need a different circle than the one we are stuck in today.
“Would that ordinary people might simply grow indignant at the gross inequities of American society and organize for progressive change. Would that economic resources and ideological energy were more symmetrically distributed; that think tanks were burgeoning at the labor left instead of on the corporate right, and that there were six thousand well-paid trade union economists and twenty corporate economists, instead of vice-versa. Would that democratic politics began to revive ‘at the base’.”
That is enough words from the book. There is so much there. It has given me new ideas. A better world is possible. We UUs pay lip service to justice, but what are we doing about it. There can be little social justice without economic justice.