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PEASANTS FOR PLUTOCRACY HOW TO
PEASANTS FOR PLUTOCRACY PLUS

This is even more striking when we look directly at incomes for different quintiles:

Under Reaganism, the median income stagnates, and gains in productivity go to the rich.

Under liberalism, gains in productivity benefit the whole country, measured here as the income of the median family.

Now, let’s look at that dividing line, at 1980. That means that various conservative charges‒ that economic progress is stifled by high tax rates, or by unions, or by large government, or by “regulation”, or by health insurance‒ just aren’t true. But more imporantly, liberalism doesn’t decrease productivity. Wages will keep rising only if productivity is rising.)īefore getting into the big bend in the income line, let me emphasize that productivity has risen at about the same rate over our entire period.I’d love to report that liberalism increases productivity, but I can’t. The basic mistake made by the USSR is that merely redistributing income at best makes for a stagnant and fairly poor society. There’s no iron law that makes wages go up over time.

For the purposes of examining social progress, the importance of the number is that if it ain’t rising, we’re doing it wrong. It covers technological progress, capital investment, access to new resources or markets, organizational changes, even social changes like decreased corruption or a movement of women into the workplace. (The economic definition of productivity is useful precisely because of its broadness and simplicity. These are per capita figures, so they already account for increasing population and they’re adjusted for inflation. Productivity (defined as GDP per capita) keeps rising, but it no longer benefits the median family. The basic case: Prosperity for allThe case for liberalism can be seen in a nutshell in this diagram, from Lane Kenworthy. you can hardly discuss Jimmy Carter without focusing on the fourfold rise in the price of oil), but looking at decades-long periods is a fair test of a political-economic system. Particular events can dominate a single presidency (e.g. Studying broad periods also evens out the business cycle and the small-scale events that dominate the daily newspaper. So it’s fair to compare the fifty years starting with Roosevelt to the thirty years starting with Reagan. But with the single exception of health care, they were mostly occupied with cleaning up the mess left by Republican presidents, and they were greatly restrained by Republicans in Congress they did little to undo the rightward shift in politics. ) And there have been Democratic presidents in the Reagan era‒ Clinton and Obama. (Nixon created the EPA, expanded affirmative action, and raised social spending from 28% to 40% of the budget‒ raising it for the first time above defense spending. But they were restrained by a Democratic Congress, and largely governed as liberals anyway. Now, obviously there were Republican presidents in the liberal period‒ Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford.

PEASANTS FOR PLUTOCRACY PLUS

(It’s not the so-called Washington Consensus of Reagan and Thatcher, which is called libéralisme in France at least.) It’s capitalism regulated by government, plus a substantial safety net. Roosevelt to that of Ronald Reagan that is, from 1933 to 1980, just under half a century.įor European readers, American liberalism is close to (but mostly to the right of) social democracy. What’s liberalism?For the purposes of this page, “liberalism” can be taken as the political/economic system the US had from the inauguration of Franklin D.

What systems actually work to measurably improve the lives of most people? We can only find out by seeing how they work in the world.

PEASANTS FOR PLUTOCRACY HOW TO

But it’s not appropriate for the basic questions of how to run a democracy. And you may need that faithlike devotion if you want to fight totalitarians or end segregation. Much of our political quagmire comes because politics takes the place once occupied by religion: people make creeds, seek converts, demonize the enemy, start wars, out of the fervency of their beliefs.

But this page will focus on practical measures. I also have a page on the morality of liberalism. Liberalism works Liberalism works And why it beats plutocracyĪs a supplement to my pages on what went wrong in the 20th century, and why libertarianism is bad, I thought I’d write about the economic system that works the best for the most people: liberalism.