It's Time To Debate Unfettered Capitalism

According to William Keegan's op-ed in the UK's Observer newspaper today, "It isn't wrong to attack unfettered capitalism - it's time someone did." Keegan is mostly talking about the coming UK premiership of Gordon Brown - a moderate leftwinger by UK standards who has kept capitalists happy while pioneering some distinctly socialist programs such as the forgiving of Third World debt. However, the last part of his column is more general and the whole thing is worth a read as a stimulant to thinking.

Keegan cites the new book Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalisation and Welfare, by Oxford economist Andrew Glyn:

Glyn was one of the first economists to identify the collapse of profits in the 1970s and provides a highly readable account of what followed. Among his many wry observations is: 'The possibility of replacing the instability of the 1960s and 1970s, which derived in good part from conflict between bosses and workers, with instability deriving from bubbles and crashes in unfettered financial markets, was not one that was contemplated in advance.'

Glyn's is not 'knee-jerk' scepticism about capitalism. For him and the rest of us, communism and a certain version of socialism have gone outside and may be some time. It is the extremes of unfettered capitalism that should concern social democrats and the moderate left, who can reasonably ask themselves whether they have been too accommodating to the extreme market version of globalisation and the 'tax cuts at any price lobby' represented by Rupert Murdoch's representative on earth, Dr Irwin ('Alka') Stelzer.

The US and UK, for all their obeisance to free markets and theoretical meritocracy, 'enjoy' the greatest inequalities of income and the least social mobility among the major industrial countries. Sweden, one of the countries least enthusiastic about the liberal economic model, had a better hourly productivity record in manufacturing from 1990 to 2003 than the US or the UK. For all the current obsession with Britain's so-called crippling tax burden, one only has to walk out in the streets to see how much work still has to be done to make this a decent society. You get what you pay for in public as well as private services.

Adam Smith believed that the three preserves of government should always be defense, education and the care of the poorer of society. Somehow, his free-market descendants have lost sight of that in their search of profit for profits sake.

There is another current of thought which gains far more currency in Europe than in the US that profits should serve actual people rather than vice versa. Even many European conservatives see the point of this way of thinking. It is often termed "positive freedom" in contrast to the freedoms of unfettered capitalism - which are all "negative" freedoms, the freedoms to be left alone by government to sink or swim on your own and the freedom to starve, go cold or go without shelter.

Positive freedom posits that it is the duty of civilized government to ensure that all the people have boots so that they can then lift themselves by their own bootstraps. It recognizes that freedom only becomes real if people are empowered to make choices for themselves, and they may need the help of others to do so.

The chaos that has arisen from a lack of reconstruction in Iraq, and the Bush administrations own admission that such reconstruction must take place before stability can occur, is an excellent case in point.

With the Dem primaries growing ever nearer, it's definitely time to have this debate anew. A couple of the front-runners can be seen as too much in the pocket of the "unfettered capitalist" lobby and we should be holding their feet to the fire about their domestic agenda and how they might change the current supremacy of that lobby.