January 31, 2004
Cultural Suicide
In every culture’s existence on earth, there’s a point where it turns inwards on itself, chokes itself of new ideas, new dreams and motivations, and dies.
Unfortunately, we are approaching that point. Before, we were simply fading into isolationism, both in terms of our politics and our knowledge of the outside world. But now we’re experiencing an even worse kind of isolation: from the marketplace of ideas. It may very well be this kind that spells the end of American prominence in the world, as well as the culture of freedom which nurtured it.
There will be all kinds of excuses for this stagnation, this self-strangling of the American culture. But it will all come down to one thing: power and the ability to keep it without earning it by fulfilling obligations to the public.
People are genuinely frustrated with the media and with most content being distributed. Because of consolidation, the competitive pressures that would have encouraged Higher quality and greater variety in the marketplace have eased. Corners are being cut, and because of the industry-wide nature of these practices, and the sheer spread of the audience, people are being forced to accept things they otherwise might seek alternatives to.
Lax anti-trust and FCC enforcement has allowed this to happen. Deregulation of market share and cross-ownership have destroyed the incentives the market normally provides to those who produce and distributed excellent material. Our media have been vertically and horizontally integrated in terms of production and distribution, so that one company can see its product go from start to finish through this process without leaving one corporations system. Because of that, work is being herded through the system from its creation to its provision to the audience without being forced to directly encounter the competitive pressure of a organization competing for the same space in the theatres or television schedules.
When the only competition that work encounters is from other works born of the same mindset, morality, and ideology, there's little cause to really think out what it is that the work advocates and manifests through its themes and its progressions.
That's not the worst of it. In order to keep interest up, the turnover for stories, for shows, for movies, are all kept at vicious pace, leading to a kind of amnesia in our culture, where we are hard pressed to remember anything past the last six months.
It's a culture of distraction and dissipation, where every thought of really sitting down and contemplating what it is one's buying into is banished by the Next Big Thing.
We can't keep it up. We can't keep up this level of distraction, apathy and ignorance, and hope to maintain this country in good working order. We cannot give more and more to business without them giving us something in return, and as long as consolidation remains the rule, these businesses will be hard pressed to remember their duties, and it will be further unlikely that they will push themselves to excel past the status quo.
The seeds of renaissance in American culture are there. We just have to force our businesses to practice competition in more than just name. Both Conservatives and Liberals stand to benefit, and already have stood up to speak out about this issue.
A resolution has already passed both the Senate and the House to back ownership caps the FCC had set that would have allowed companies to own enough stations to reach 39 percent of people in America. This FCC decision allowed News Corp. and Viacom, owner of CBS to keep many of the stations they had bought up, where otherwise they would have had to give them up. Under the bill that passed both the Congress and the Senate, the previous rule would have stood as it was. But some unscrupulous legislators slipped the provisions back into the fine print of the recent omnibus spending bill, along with all the pork and spending, so the previous law had been scuttled.
The Senate passed a resolution to reverse that rider, but Tom DeLay pronounced that resolution "dead on arrival", and promised never to let it come to a vote. If it had been allowed, it is likely that the resolution would have passed.
The Bush White House has been consistent in backing the expansion of the market share these people are allowed, even with all the public disgust with media consolidation. If things are to the point that even such committed bipartisan opposition to further expansion is not permitted, how far are we from cultural and political stagnation? How far are we from having fifty-seven channels and nothing on, as the old Springsteen song goes?
Broadcasting is one of the few parts of the media in which the government's power and the corporation's obligations are clear. For the scarce radio bandwidth they take from the people's use in given area, the broadcasters are supposed to fulfill certain obligations. Make good use of the airwaves, keep the technology up and working, broadcast within the standards, inform people of events and political debates, and allow for contrasting points of view to be presented.
But the more the media consolidates, the more it becomes a cash cow for corporate america, and the more government deregulates for their benefit, the more these obligations are forgotten, and the poorer the quality of the content and the service rendered.
Combined with the almost monolithic control that the media companies have over the cable channels, this consolidation is ensuring that we will get fewer points of view, fewer choices, and fewer facts about what's really going locally, nationally, and abroad. It ensures that when politics shift in those few corporations, those with unpopular views will be marginalized, unheard. It ensures that local interests will be ignored and local standards of morality and tradition will be utterly overwhelmed by a bland, focus-grouped pop culture.
And that will be the start of it. In America, the energy and the creativity have been fed by a culture that feeds multiple, emergent ways of life, which allows the holding of a whole host of opinions and the competition between those different ideas of the world. Nowhere else has the marketplace of ideas been established with such shining success. But that could all disappear, all be overwhelmed if the only interests our government takes on are those of a few lazy-minded executives who want profits they didn't earn.
We wrote a constitution 200 years ago to ensure that no one in our government would have the arbitrary authority to declare what is or is not truth for the rest of us or tell us what can and cannot be said. It would be a tragedy indeed if we were to allow that arbitrary authority in our nation to fall into the hands of those who we can't even kick out of office.
Posted by Stephen Daugherty at January 31, 2004 01:52 PMStephen, I think I can understand the idea that Mr. Bush is so caught up in himself and his needs, as well as the needs of his cronies, that he would ruin our democracy, our environment and, perhaps the world. I can understand that he is unable to look beyond his nose and see that the direction he is heading is going to ruin our democracy and our future freedoms (not to mention the environment). After all, he is rather stupid, arrogant and self-serving. But, what I have difficulty understanding is how and why so many “responsible” individuals are supporting a similar direction.
I see this support in the Republican legislators, and in the press. I wonder if they ever stop to introspect and confront themselves in this rather evil effort that is going to destroy our democracy and our future. Are the media so caught up in their own self-engrandisement that they NEVER look at the long term consequence of supporting and promoting this type of self-centered governing that we see today? Isn’t anyone in the press or in congress concerned about HOW Mr. Bush “won” this office? Are the senators and representatives so blind that they can not see the motives of this administration? It is our future that should be the focus of their efforts, not the profits that can be garnered in the present.
The most serious threat to our society and to our governmental system, is the collusion that is apparent between the press and those in power who would steal our way of life, coupled with an apathetic and disinterested constituency. But then, how are the people ABLE to know they are being duped, if all they have is propaganda?
Posted by: Michael Lowery at January 31, 2004 07:42 PMMy Professor had a list of rules, one of which is The camera alwayslies. It selects a certain part of the world around it, leaves certain things out, grabs things from their context and puts them in a new one.
Writing and other means of communications do the same. So in essence, objectivity in communication is impossible. We have ways of getting past the limitations that imposes. We can check other sources, figure out ways to test and probe the situation, work our way past the choices of the words to what they’re trying to deal with. Only in totalitarian system does propaganda work anywhere near perfect, and even there you can have trouble.
So don’t despair. Just as there is no way to completely avoid deception by others, there’s no way for others to always successfully decieve us.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at January 31, 2004 09:14 PMStephen -
One of the consequences of having a free marketplace of ideas is that some ideas win and other lose. Actually, in most free systems (not just markets), it’s usually a small minority that ends up dominating the large majority of the market. There is nothing “unfair” or “unjust” or “amoral” about it — that’s just a law of nature. And that’s a good thing —- the whole point of a market is that every item does not get equal coverage —- the bad ones get weeded out and the good ones remain.
In your essay, you lament the state of our marketplace of ideas. You say that the big corporate broadcasters are hand-in-glove with the government. The part you fail to explain is that the current situation is driven by customers. There are plenty of news sources that provide coverage with an anti-establishment, anti-corporate and anti-administration tilt. People are free to give those sources their patronage.
What you are arguing for (and this is a recurrent theme in many liberal essays) is elitism. These people don’t know what they’re doing!! They’re taking us down the road of ruin!! They’re watching all the wrong news programs!!
The people will watch whatever channel they damn well please, thank you.
The marketplace of ideas is very much alive, and more so in America than anywhere else in the world. One consequence of that is that a lot of people call it sour grapes.
Posted by: Vivek at February 1, 2004 07:39 AMVivek, you said: Actually, in most free systems (not just markets), it’s usually a small minority that ends up dominating the large majority of the market. There is nothing “unfair” or “unjust” or “amoral” about it — that’s just a law of nature.
Thank you. You have just articulated the fundamental philosophical difference between conservatives (Republican and Libertarian) and liberals. The conservative philosophy is in fact built upon the idea of sustain thyself, or perish (law of the jungle). The liberal position is that what is good for humanity (the majority) is also good for the individual.
Thus true conservatives (not Bush)love to sanction laws that remove government from the lives of individuals and leave them to their own devices provided their own devices do not interfere with other self-sustaining individuals. Whereas, the liberals love to sanction laws that make the deficiencies of the individual a concern for everyone, to the extent that the resources of everyone can indeed help eliminate the effects of those deficiencies upon everyone.
So, conservatives like laws that punish, liberals like laws that rehabilitate. Conservatives like laws that promote the most competitive having the most resources, whereas liberals like laws that both encourage competition without ignoring the remediable deficiencies of the less-competitive. Conservatives believe in pork for the most competitive, liberals believe in pork for the least competitive. Conservatives like the idea of evolution which dictates the less competitive should cease to reproduce making room for more competitive folks. Liberals abhor the idea of survival of the fittest when it means suffering and premature death for those least fittest.
Talk about moral high ground, liberals have it all over conservatives if the teachings of Jesus are the basis for that highground. But even in terms of ethics, liberals hold the high ground for similar reasons.
Posted by: David R. Remer at February 1, 2004 08:13 AMVivek-
It seems you missed the point. It is NOT the customers who are driving the “hand-in-glove” relationship between corporate broadcasters and the government. It is driven by a blindness that focuses on the here-and-now desire to profit personally at the expense of many, and at the expense of the future - for all.
For example, if corporate broadcasters were given the opportunity to own all (or most, as is being promoted by the current administration) of the news outlets, then the “customers” would only get what the government and corporate broadcasters wanted them to read, see and hear. Unfortunately, this would not always be objective, nor truthful.
I get the impression that your perspective is saying, “Tough luck losers, the superior few are the winners. We don’t care that it is the cause of your demise.” Well, the “losers” here are the middle class and our system of government. I wonder if Mr. Bush and his supporters ever ask what would happen if they were completely successful and a very few at the top completely dominated the rest. Well, the answer is: without a middle class, there is nothing the “few” could dominate. The majority of people live within the middle class here in America and are the driving force behind the strength of this nation. The rich need the middle class to be rich. Get it?
The liberal argument is not one of sour grapes, but one of true compassion for our fellow man and our children’s future.
Posted by: Michael Lowery at February 1, 2004 01:43 PMThank you. You have just articulated the fundamental philosophical difference between conservatives (Republican and Libertarian) and liberals. The conservative philosophy is in fact built upon the idea of sustain thyself, or perish (law of the jungle). The liberal position is that what is good for humanity (the majority) is also good for the individual.
Here the two of us completely agree. That indeed is the underlying philosophical difference, and just pointing it out improves the debate greatly.
To dig a little deeper, the battle is between the idea of the individual, and the idea of the collective — when you say, “what is good for humanity (the majority) is also good for the individual.”
This has been, I think, (along with the existence of God, morality, and forms of government), one of the oldest debates in philosophy, so I don’t think a few of us humble thinkers can entirely sort it out in a comment thread ;-)
What you can do, though, is use objective reality as a measure of the success of an idea. An idea that fosters life and freedom and human well-being is morally good, and one that doesn’t is morally evil.
Then look over history at societies and forms of government that tilted towards the individual (fewer controls, freer markets, individual rights are inviolate) and those that tilted towards “humanity” (lots of controls, “managed” markets, individuals subjugated to “larger” needs). If you can objectively look at such systems over history, you will have your answer.
One argument I’ve often found in these comment threads is: look, the US is a “mixed” economy, and it’s doing pretty well, so mixed economy must be the way to go. That is logically wrong —- what should be analyzed is what components of a mixed economy make it vital and successful, and what components tend to bring it down. The fact the the American “mixed” economy is successful is only because (in the modern world) it has the most tilt towards free markets.
Michael —
there are no “losers”. When an idea wins in the marketplace, everybody benefits. The winning idea doesn’t take anything away from the losing idea —- and everybody can go on to use the winning idea and benefit from it. E.g. the idea that tractors “won” over ploughs didn’t take anything away from the people that used ploughs —- they benefited too.
Vivek, I believe in competition, in the need to have the best win out. But I also believe that we need rules to keep that competition from stagnating, and to keep the winners from getting lazy. Buying out most of the other competitors does constitute a victory, but it’s one that destroys the competition you and I both agree is beneficial to the economy.
Don’t call it elitist, though. It may be authoritarian, but it’s aimed at enriching and raising the quality of life for many, instead of just a few.
The average person has been deprived of much of their choice for what to watch, what to listen to, for who they can appeal to to take up the slack that other competitors won’t. It’s harder to get these people to do what they are supposed to do, harder to prevent them from abusing their position as leasers of America’s radio and television spectrums and holders of cable and internet bandwidth.
If you call that a populist policy, I don’t know why. I suppose you can interject a big government argument into this, trying to make it look like some elites are imposing controls on the free market. Problem is, that government’s elected by the people, subject to popular support, at large and in local communities. The government itself can act in elitist ways, and elitists can find their way into the whole thing, but nothing absolutely guarantees that they will remain there.
I mean, if you want to get political about this, the very fact that your party has a majority should speak to that, according to your own rhetoric. But still, you complain on and on about big government, when you in fact are now the party that runs it, sets its policies. It’s just a big rhetorical club that you take out to bludgeon criticism of your laissez faire attitude towards businesses.
Right now, there is little the public can do to escape from the media conglomerates practices, Little they can do to remedy them. The number of Radio and TV stations out there is fixed by the physics and electronics of broadcasting, The number of cable channels restricted by bandwidth concerns. Additionally, the creation and maintenance of any such new station requires great amounts of capital.
Now, you can wax democratic about the flow of money from consumer’s hands to the businesses, but the money the networks and cable companies gain from advertisors bears more the mark of the marketed companies than than it does the consumer’s wishes. The what and the why of the consumer’s interest in the programming is inferred, not directly apprehended by those making the programming. This half-blind process ensures a perpetual lag between the company’s understanding of the public will and interests, and the reality of such.
The Media is by necessity an elite group, of intrinsically limited membership. Your measures make that elite a group of more exclusive membership and ownership. That elite, in engaging with the public does so with it’s own hypothesis of means and ends in mind.
I say hypothesis instead of theory because the latter word would imply an certainty and an determinative power that the guesses of the media elite do not and will not ever possess. Nobody will get it utterly right, nor remain right forever.
Which brings me to my conclusion. We must counter the consolidation of the media, because that consolidation thins the multitude of voices that our culture relies upon to remain robust. It allows us alternatives to erroneous thinking and theory that otherwise the Media elites would naturally, in the strengths of their own beliefs, take from us. To allow media consolidation to continue is to allow the stagnation and the thinning of our own picture of ourselves as a culture. It is to impoverish the imagination of the public as to what we as a people and a nation can do, and choose to be. This is the cultural suicide my essay speaks of, the strangling of our public consciousness which is bound to eventually cause the death of our nation as we know it.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at February 2, 2004 10:55 AMVivek-
If a winning idea overtakes a losing idea, to be sure, the losing idea, itself, does not die. People remember it. ;-) However, that which the idea produces (e.g. the plough), ceases, or, at least experiences a diminished impact. If the tractor and the plough are in competition, the plough loses. Furthermore, those that continue to use a losing idea faid into oblivion. Those who continued to use the plough after the inception of the tractor certainly lost the competitive edge in commercial farming, right? That being said, I’not sure your example of a plough logically fits the crux of my concern.
I have been watching politics and the reporting of politics since the sixties. During this time I have seen a growing, mutually supporting, relationship between the press and the political right. It scares me.
My fear is that the end result will be the demise of our multiple party system of government. Although I have been aware of the dominance of the right wing element of the Republican party (and bewildered-since the majority reports having Democratic leanings) over this time span, my concern that there seems to be an unfair advantage augmented by a conservative bias in the press has grown dramatically with the current administration. Take for example, the dubious victory in Florida.
I am not alone with this notion regarding the demise of our two party system. It has been expressed by none other than William Buckley who recently wrote (Jan. 7, 2004) “There is much to be gained from the two-party system. If the second party is reduced to true impotence, the republic suffers.” My point is, if the press does not return to an honest and objective reporting of events, there will be a loser. That loser is the Democratic party which represents the majority. The middle class.
If the “idea” that wins the marketplace is total dominance of one party, we ALL are losers.
Posted by: Michael Lowery at February 2, 2004 11:15 AMStephen
I am so glad that someone not only sees this but is driven to write about it.
I am one of many artists no longer interpreting America as something beautiful, rather creating imagery representing a loss of beauty.
You can take this change any way you like not take it at all or not even see it, becoming part of the jumbled up mess caused by a merge of the Arts and Necessity. For me it has always been a very artistic view of change. Growing up in a little farm town in north west Ohio it was and will always be the most natural times of my life. All I knew then was that I loved throwing mud and that is just about all I needed to know. I can remember the feeling of waitlesness as I travle up the stairs in my fathers arms half asleep. Growing into the 90’s for me was a feeling of comformaty and no more mud throwing, a much less natural world. But a world still lived inside me, a world that alowed me to think those things still and an incredible imagination grew out of hope and a pure love for natural life. I was extremely influenced by people you were influenced by extremely influential people. I felt that I was becoming part of a stream of thought carried on by my young open mined, a knowledge and understanding of past culture thru the collective mind of others. I am a child of the 80’s a time of commercial comfort in our nation. Commercial comfort being the rape of an innocent society. Sure our parents saw a time of conformalistic activity like much of pop culture today but in the 60’s they were still fighting and there were much better odds, a time when people followed ideas not trends. Realistic boundaries where being crossed witch many people bought into. The nations economy is constantly being built on the week foundation of a realistic false. A realistic false carried on the underbelly of modern technology. Technology is pushed forward by the great minds and inventors of our world. Unfortunatly these great minds are no longer driven by the natural world, rather the comercial value of there idea. ( Einstein is to Gandhi as Bill Gates is to George W. Bush )
Before mass media and commercialism someone walking down the street may have been interested in how to improve the shoes he or she is wearing to enable them to walk further without having to stop and rest there sore feet. Once that was solved he or she was bothered by the thought of having to walk a lit lantern down the hallway at night in order to use the bathroom. It was then that necessity drove inventors to invent not the comercial value of there idea. There comes a point in time when you have discovered all of those necessity’s a man needs in order to live comfortably in a primitive world. What does that person think of now that they have all the needs to live. Naturally that would be entertainment. Entertainment then was a play a magic trick or reading a book, what ever it was, it was story telling, just another form of communicating an idea ( yet another lost art ). Society had all that they needed to live well in the world, a base to build the future on. So what went wrong?
There are two things in this world that must live apart from each other in order for the world to stay a peaceful place and that is Art and Necessity. Man hit a point in time where he had no need for money he needed only those few things to keep him alive and well. The discovery of weaponry would form out of tools intended for hunting. A stick a rock an ax a catapult a gun a canon a bomb a virus, a plane what’s next? To every one simple invention or necessity there are thousands of forms of them today. Just in our lifetime we have scene the build up of thousands of forms of computer systems, you know what they are, and you depend on them as if they were an extension of your personality. The rate in growth of technology is at an all time high, and there’s a feeling of Civil War in product development. Product advertisers ride the latest trend throwing there little spin on things hoping to rise above the rest. Mega stores are corporate battlefields, all different variations of necessity’s fighting to make it up walls of endless trenches waiting to be sent home. Products like shampoo and cereal have all gone thru this developmental faze, and now more like a competition to be the leader in shampoo or cereal. The leaders have already been established in many forms of so called necessity. It was always the company’s that pioneered its product that stood the test of time. A change occurred that built up from the introduction of brand identity, and now today’s commercially influenced consumer is given the choice between Suave, Head and Shoulders and a thousand other forms of shampoo or cereal or soda. The television has proven to be the most ideal weapon of mass exposer (as I like to call it), since the beginning of this strange product War.
Cell phones today are a form of what I call disposable technology. We live in a world were technology changes so quickly that it is now acceptable to buy a one hundred dolor cell phone one month only to toss it and buy another the very next month because it has a camera or video game. It’s something you can see in cell phones only because we are in the beginning stages in development of the product and there is an increasing number of variations being produced. All of these company’s are trying to be what Ford is to the motor industry and what Coca Cola is to the beverage industry. In this stage Corporate America is cashing in on this little form of technology that has made the average Americans income disposable. It’s a disposable income for a disposable technology for a disposable society. We are a country reinventing inventions, and I throw up about it.
Company’s today are only a mass amount of people representing a product, or a number of products that have no necessary value, and are no different from the other form of it sitting on the drawing board in the building of there competitor down the street or the next city over. Design has taken the world on a strange ride, a ride that continues to rise higher than anyone could have ever imagined or may imagine. A piling up of variations of one thing, necessary or artistic and it’s the continuing rise of artistic variations of our necessities that create new products, products that are advertised with a build up of many new forms of advertising, design, and media. Media that forms the personality’s of those lost in the translation of it. Trends don’t last long enough anymore in order to allow spread to a large number of people to give the world a sense of equality. Its this slow transition from trend to trend that fogs the minds of the global society, dumbing there mental processes to simple instant pleasures preformed through short attention spans and shortness of thought in one direct idea that may or may not result in positive benefit of more than there own.
( HEADLINE : AMERICA DIAGNOSED WITH A.D.D. )
There seems to be great pressure to create Safe imagery with the build up of commercialism. Safe imagery has pruned creativity at its roots. The city has changed from a comunity of fine Artists from all over the globe to a city full of celebrities and executive types. The city was once built by artists and was once heavily populated by artists. There came a change when the business man realized the commercial possibilities that art could offer. It was then that art became corporate and now year’s later cities are full of high priced apartments waiting to be filled by a growing number of commercial artists with institutionalized skill. Americas education system directly effected by this trend in the 1980’s with a miss directed focus on higher education, to say that those in College benefit from a College education as apposed to society benefiting from a college education. Kids today sent to College with dady’s credit card are enjoying there 4 more years of drinking and partying. Government funds miss directed in a society of miss directed thought due to the realization of the power in media in the hands of the wrong people. With more and more influence among a growing art community focused on the wrong thing its hard for anyone to create something truly new. Its this that has built a false scene and a false representation of what an artist really is. It’s time to stop creating variations of things, its time to start thinking outside the box. There will be another Bill gates or Pacasso and it will surely come from someone removed from a society lost in the translation ( thank you Sofio Coppola ). As artists we must remove ourselves from a dumb down society, and become more aware of our place on this earth.
I truly see our window of opportunity closing, and I think its time that artists everywhere use their God given talents to change the direction we are heading. They are God given for a reason and God dam it if we don’t rise to this challenge.
Chris, I’m of the opinion that there is nothing clean and simple about the way the mind works. You can separate art and necessity in your imagination, but in reality there is no real bright-line distinction that can be drawn between the two.
If you will notice, a crucial part of my response to Vivek concerned the fallibility of human thought, that is, left to itself, media consolidation would allow the political and theoretical blindspots of the major players to dominate the Marketplace of Ideas.
It’s when those theoretical blindspots merge into a national blindspot that we’re in trouble. It’s going to be those unquestioned, unexamined issues that are going to turn around and bite us on the rear.
This will be true whether the media skews liberal, conservative, Red, Pink, Chartreuse, queer, straight, or Nun-Locked-Away-In-A-Convent. It will be true whatever they honor more, political correctness or incorrectness. When the voices heard are lessened, there are fewer people left to point out the things we would not notice, or want to notice, to call us down from our ego-driven high horse to actually get our hands dirty in the facts. It is only from those facts that our nation can react and act appropriately.
If the big companies were doing their best to counteract the effects of consolidation, making sure that corporate policy didn’t overwhelm local voices or newsgathering for the public’s benefit, I would have no problem. But one just has to look at the desolation of the content in many branches of the media to take note of the negative effects of consolidation.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at February 2, 2004 08:48 PMVivek, it is good we agree on the philosophy. Because from there, we depart radically. Quote: What you can do, though, is use objective reality as a measure of the success of an idea. An idea that fosters life and freedom and human well-being is morally good, and one that doesn’t is morally evil.
Nothing in objective reality or history is anywhere close to being that black and white. This is one of the failings I find in political rhetoric. In our history and our democracy today, there is no evidence that the socialist programs the U.S. has implemented were in any way evil. Nor is there any evidence that Reagan’s era of huge deficit spending and national debt were in any way evil. It was about choices and priorities.
FDR’s programs had many positive returns for millions of people. Reagan’s rising tide lifts all boats had many positive returns for millions of people. And both President’s programs had downsides, called opportunity costs. In choosing to go one way, one loses the opportunity and benefits of having gone another way.
It is this opportunity cost that so many pundits and idealogues on both sides of the aisle try to deem evil and bad for society, usually out of the context of the good that came from the roads taken.
Then look over history at societies and forms of government that tilted towards the individual (fewer controls, freer markets, individual rights are inviolate) and those that tilted towards “humanity” (lots of controls, “managed” markets, individuals subjugated to “larger” needs). If you can objectively look at such systems over history, you will have your answer.
I can look at it fairly objectively and your conclusions don’t match mine. You use the word tilt, Russia was not tilted a bit toward command economy - it was a command economy. Had Russia followed China’s path, it could still be a superpower today. China, is a mixed economy. China’s economic growth has been surpassing ours for almost a decade now, and the world wide recession that hit when Bush took office hit China too, but, they still managed 8.3% growth through their worst year.
And this is why your analysis breaks down, in my view. It is not about evil and good, it is about priorities and opportunity costs. China as well as Great Britain, and the U.S. are all mixed economies and they are the most successful nations on the planet economically.
China is using its mixed economy to grow the largest middle class national population the world has ever seen. Their socialized programs have moved 100’s of millions from subsistence rural farming which never saw paper money, to larger towns, cities, and hamlets and trained them in manufacturing and service jobs which in turn has elevated domestic demand.
One argument I’ve often found in these comment threads is: look, the US is a “mixed” economy, and it’s doing pretty well, so mixed economy must be the way to go.
Mixed economy is nothing more than Bush’s Leave No Child Behind act on a grander scale. A mixed economy means that public funds are collected from all (supposedly) and used to shore up sectors of the population which are not achieving that productive consumer demand standard of life that is afforded to others by the free enterprise system. Mixed economy means using tax revenues to achieve national goals, individuals and localities simply have not the resources to achieve individually.
Under Democrats, welfare meant hand out with no work. A miserable failure of a program which did nothing to elevate the recipients to productive consuming middle class status. Republicans came along and modified (note: not got rid of) the program to state that if you want assistance, you must work. It was a socialized program that had tremendous benefits and far greater success than the Democrat’s welfare system. The Republican plan was nonetheless, a social program, taking taxes from the working and using it to assist those not working to work.
There is nothing inherently wrong or bad with socialism or free enterprise because both are miserable failures if manifested in pure form. The purest form of free enterprise ideology can be found in the Libertarian Platform. We tried that at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, if failed. Those are the historical facts.
It is when the best of both systems are applied in appropriate proportion and given due oversight and protections against excesses to address specific problems on a cost benefit analysis basis, that something workable, productive and which approaches doing the greatest good for least cost, is approximated in society.
That is logically wrong —- what should be analyzed is what components of a mixed economy make it vital and successful, and what components tend to bring it down. The fact the the American “mixed” economy is successful is only because (in the modern world) it has the most tilt towards free markets.
Sorry, America owes its success to a huge middle class consuming population which came about as a result of unions, social security, FDR’s government hiring of unemployed for infrastucture development, etc. There have been failed social programs just as the headlines today are filled with failures of free enterprise. The best of both has made this nation great, and our nation will only remain great if we continue.
Going to Mars is a social program. Public schools are a social program. Maintenance of the Interstate highway system to high standards is a social program. Mixed economies are well defended in the past and today as the very best of all possible systems. Getting the mix properly proportioned will be endlessly debated.
Posted by: David R. Remer at February 3, 2004 06:53 AM
