Thursday, October 14, 2010

This Week's "Economist" Cover

The weekly news journal, Britain's Economist generally has tons of factual detail and excellent, quality writing. Oftentimes they provide information and analysis on current events that is essential for understanding the world around us. BUT, their overall world view is nonsense. They subscribe to a deluded liberal economic philosophy as filtered through the prejudices and fantasies of the financial sector.

That's why I found this week's cover so hilarious. I'm not posting an image of it because I'm not sure whether they're litigious defenders of their intellectual property or advocates of the free sharing of information, that is, libertarians for whom such things as patents and intellectual property rights are unjust monopolies imposed by the state. In case it's the former, here's my description of it:

An image of a man's face, from the nose to the top of his head, with his eye's cast upwards towards a tiny tuft of hair on the top of his otherwise bald head, with the caption: "Grow, dammit, grow!"

This is meant to be a metaphor for the world's economy. They follow this with the statement:

"Economic growth may depend on structural reforms as much as prudent macroeconomic policy."

But here's the thing: The Economist's editorial policy has pretty much had the field for the past few decades. All the crap that they endorse: breaking unions, liberalization, globalization, fiscal restraint, monetarist anti-inflation, ... ALL OF IT, ... has been indulged with increasing intensity since 1980. And it has been precisely these anti-human, deluded, selfish, imbecilic policies that have brought the world to ever larger economic crises.

The world economy teeters on the brink (to say nothing of the world's ecology) because elites have destroyed the material foundations of the world's wealthiest consumer base, creating a system that depended upon increasing levels of household debt and investment bubbles built on ever flimsier premises.

So, I have no interest in even hearing whatever lame-brain structural reforms or prudent macroeconomic policies they're advocating in their magazine. Whatever value can be gleaned from The Economist is far less worthy than the time wasted wading through their deluded drivel.

9 comments:

Mark said...

Sarbanes-Oxley was passed by a Republican president and congress. The current "health-care reform" bill has more pages than the original US constitution has words, and you seriously think the The Economist's editorial policy has ruled the roost for the last several decades?!?

In Canada, it takes a Supreme Court decision to get the government to relinquish it's stranglehold over health-care, and yet in genuinely more socialistic countries, like France, a private system has and continues to flourish alongside the public system. User fees are the norm in public hospitals, but in Canada, no politician, even the "conservative" ones, would consider such a modest proposal.

Even a no-brainer, relatively easy to accomplish piece of de-regulation, like allowing Canadians to receive HBO in their homes without a grey market satellite, didn't occur until 2007, and even then, I'm sure HBO has to comply with a bunch of bullshit Canadian Content regulations and partner with a Canadian Content provider like Global or Rogers.

Canada and the US are definitely not socialist countries, but I'd hardly consider policy makers to be under the thrall of the editorial writers at The Economist.

thwap said...

Mark,

Are you serious? Taxes are at levels unseen since the 1950s. Wealth inequality is surpassing 1920s levels. Unionization in the USA is at pre-1930s levels and it's about the same in Canada for the private sector.

I don't know what Sarbanes-Oxley or whatever it is, is, and Obama's health care reform was a gift to the insurance industry, NOT socialism by any stretch of the imagination.

Finally, Canadian telecom companies are doing an excellent job of fleecing Canadian consumers, so the regulations that you speak of weren't exactly designed with "the people" in mind. Admittedly the Economist would decry these gifts to big business, but this would be due to their blinkered, deluded view about how power works in a capitalist society.

Besides the fact that there never was an economic system operating along the lines of Milton Friedman's or Von Mises' theories, the moment in time when things did approach that model were terrible for most of the people affected.

The broad strokes, the medium strokes, and many of the small dashes, have all conformed as best they could to the delusions of the "libertarian" fantasists of the City of London.

Mark said...

I'd suggest you take the time to google "Sarbanes-Oxley" if you believe that small-government conservatives are running the show in Washington, DC. My point re: Canadian telecommunications isn't whether or not the regulations are good or bad, but that nothing has been de-regulated in any meaningful sense of the word.

If Ottawa was full of small-government minded de-regulators, making satellites legal would have been a cheap and easy to score points with suburban voters and achieve de-regulation, but that has been a relatively recent phenomenon, and as pointed out in my earlier comments, done in a half-assed, half-hearted manner.

Unions? I spent the better part of a decade working in union run shops and never made more than $25k a year in my best year. The worst unionized workshop I worked at was the unionized call center that mysteriously couldn't deliver wages that were more than what the non-union shop across town paid, but that didn't stop them from collecting their dues. Mysteriously, my income more than doubled in less than two years after moving to the Wild West that is the US labor market.

Comparing income inequality between 2010 and the 1920s is baffling to me. Even when I was making $25k or less a year, I knew I had it better, in terms of quality of life, than someone in the top 5% of income earners from 1920.

thwap said...

Mark,

So, like i googled "Sarbanes-Oxley" and i see that it was (whatever its merits or demerits) a response to the titanic corporate fraud of Enron Tyco, and Worldcom. Ostensibly it was supposed to prevent accounting fraud. I honestly can't believe that you'd bring that up in 2010, after the deregulation of the rest of the financial sector (Clinton signing of the so-called "Financial Services Modernization Act" of 1999) has blown up in our faces!

You know, the Economist doesn't editorialize in support of Enron's lies. Just the boards of directors that their editors sit on do. The magazine exists in a fantasy-land where super wealthy, super powerful corporate interests don't lean on the political system that they control to ensure that the rules favour them, and that even if they break the rules, nothing will happen to them.

Magazines like The Economist and economists in general, act like priests, who know that their wealthy parishoners "sin" against the rules of their supposed religions, but these "sinners" are the people who butter their bread. So, the priests utter their bromides and the cynical lay-people nod their heads in agreement and forget everything they hear once mass is over.

Which goes back to my statement of Canadian telecoms. These regulations are NOT the misguided attempts to control the markets for the benefit of the majority, they are NOT the efforts of power-mad state regulators to show the market who is boss. They are designed to aid the profits of already-powerful members of Canada's economic elite at the expense of the public.

Again, The Economist would officially frown upon such things, and their readers will agree unless they happen to be the industry that is seeing its ox being gored. Then they'd harrumph and turn the page.

Regarding your evidence about the neutered, useless union at your call centre, ... I'm not sure how the existence of some powerless service-sector union cancels out my thesis that the union movement in North America has been tamed.

Regardless of your own experiences in the US labour market, the fact of the matter is that things have become more precarious, less rewarding for millions and millions of workers. Just witness the desperation in the USA, the precariousness of the economy you're attempting to celebrate.

That precariousness, the whole "grow dammit, grow!" is the result of the impoverishing of more and more people thanks to NAFTA, off-shoring, welfare "reform" and decades of union-busting.

Mark said...
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Mark said...
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Mark said...

Sorry, I didn't write anything bad about you in my last comments, but since this is your blog, and I'm a guest, I thought it was best to give you the last word...kinda:)

thwap said...

Mark,

That's actually very considerate of you. Because I'm finding myself with little time to blog these days.

On the other hand, I actually enjoyed trashing your arguments ;), so, if you've got what you wrote saved somehow, re-post it and don't feel bad if I don't respond.

What you've said (in my view) shows either the remnants of the regulatory state, or it provides a more nuanced view of the world that i still believe follows the Economists' world view rather than any humane, sensible world view.

Mark said...

Well, I didn't feel terribly trashed after reading your comments - I just realized I had hit an intellectual impasse in the thread. The Roman Catholic Church could start handing out condoms, joints, ordaining women, and marrying gays, and it wouldn't make a lick of difference to me: I have no interest in being a Roman Catholic. Maybe that make me irrational, stupid or ignorant, but in the end I don't believe what their selling.

For better or worse, your premises might very well be correct and your conclusions might be valid, but ultimately, if the choir consists of Marx, Che, and Naomi Klein, I'd rather go to hell and enjoy whatever music is being played by Penn Jillette, P.J. O'Rourke, and John Stagliano.