OWN,

India, like most third-world countries in the 60s and 70s, followed an essentially socialist model.  As a result, most of those countries could barely feed themselves.  The more those countries have embraced freer economic models, the more they have prospered.  Ireland is an excellent example; it was once a basket case; it is now the "Celtic Tiger." 

If central planning is such a good thing, why has it not worked out so well in the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, etc., etc. etc.?  Why is the French economy in such poor shape today if central planning is so effective?  Why was Britain the "poor man of Europe" when its economy was centrally planned, and why has its economy boomed in the aftermath of the Thatcher reforms?  Why is "New Labour" "New" Labour if the Old Labour party's ideas were so successful?

The U.S. economy was dynamic and successful long before central planners ever got their hands on it.  The kind of central planning you seem to favor works to enhance capitalism; isn't that what you folks normally call fascism?  I thought you were opposed to fascism.

Much of the central planning you mention in the US was designed to benefit the dreaded "military-industrial" complex.  Surely, then, you should have opposed it.  We are using the internet right now because it was initially designed to benefit the military. 

I am perfectly happy to defend the US, warts and all, as a generally successful capitalist economy that has brought far more freedom to far more people in the world than any other regime that has ever existed in the history of the world.  Much more progress could have been made if much of the twentieth century had not been spent fending off the utopian dreams of centrally planned economies (especially those of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany).

Now, I would ask you to show me an economic system that is/was FUNDAMENTALLY centrally planned that (a) has ever been economically successful and (b) has ever done as much to enhance worldwide liberty as the US has.  Don't forget that the US economy was in the doldurms in the 1970s; it was thanks in large part to Reagan's reorganization of the tax system that the boom of the 80s and 90s occurred.

By the way, you don't have to be snide in your tone.  Just argue calmly and rationally.  What's so hard about that?

You're correct that I don't have a degree in economics, but, as you must know, there are many, many people who do have such degrees who disagree with you and who can make the case far more effectively than I can. 

An interesting article on public vs. private schools and the economic success of India:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11571960/site/newsweek/

OldCBA'er:

A few bones of contention:

1.) Third World nations that "followed a socialist model" in the 60's and 70's often did so because they were given a choice between either accepting a brutal, anti-communist dictator backed by the USA or becoming Soviet clients. The Soviets spouted all that specious nonsense about the brotherhood of all humanity, irregardless of race, and equal distribution of wealth--what claptrap,eh?--and they also armed their clients against USA funded insurrections such as those of Jonas Savimbe in Angola and the Contras in Nicaragua. Since the tin pot dictators too often had been chummy with the old colonial regimes the choice of a "socialist model" was something of a no brainer: either take the Migs, the AK-47's and the Five Year Plans or go back to subaltern status in a reconstituted colonialism. It takes a lot to scare people away from the evil they know to a freedom they haven't seen. But folks like Fulgencio Batista and Mobutu SeSe Seko were scary enough to do it. Scholars of this aspect of the capitalist world system call it "neo-colonialism."

Plus there's the little matter of the systematic under-development of colonized countries, like India, by their European and American masters. The indigenous Indian textile and iron industries for example were destroyed by the British Empire to protect jobs at home. The term "banana republic" also refers to systematic under-development, this time by successive neo-colonial regimes in the southern Americas that existed primarily to keep United Fruit in the black, even if that meant that generations of campesinos were kept in ignorance and misery.

Out of that morass of capitalist imperialism emerged crippled, psuedo-independent nations that for survival were forced to rely on inequitable trade relations forged by their ex-colonial masters. The fact that they didn't exactly "thrive" in the 60's and 70's--or now, really--had less to do with "Soviet-style" central planning and more to do with the fact that their economies were stunted by a century of systemtatic colonialist under-development.  Of course the IMF was more than happy to step in and help in the reinstitution of colonialism by its newest name: "globalization."

2.) The US economy was not "healthy and thriving" before American style socialist interventions such as social security and the GI Bill, not if you were one of the people who did the actual work in the factories, mines and mills. If you were one of those folks, the immediate forerunner of such New Deal reforms was called "The Great Depression"--look it up--one of those periodic catastrophic failures of laissez faire capitalism that occur often enough that many rational observers infer that such failures are systemic not anomalous. There had been similar economic failures in 1919, 1894 and 1877. Two of these were every bit as bad as the one my grandparents lived through from 1929-1941.

When WWII ended, many folks assumed that the Depression would come back. With something like 14 million GI's reentering the civilian workforce there was a distinct possibility that the "healty and thriving" US economy would slip right back into hard times.  Harry Truman had to scramble around like mad to keep the old FDR coalition viable in the face of old line GOP that wanted to take America back to 1890's. But Harry managed to pass socialist-style reforms, such as the GI Bill, that redistributed wealth in such a way as to forestall the inevitable next systemic failure for several decades. It was Keynesian-ism,  government "pump priming" and planning that comprise the essense of liberal political economic thought, not capitalism, that built the post-war boom.

3.) As far as your charge that many American socialist-style reforms--the Eisenhower expressway system notably--arose strictly to serve the evil "military industrial complex" Eisenhower warned of: so what? The defense buildup has always been seen by cynical insiders as Keynesian economic planning, a jobs program that enables big defense contractors to keep a big workforce, pay high wages and fund R&D generously. It's the same program Hitler and the Nazis used to pull Germany out of the Great Depression. As archliberal Richard Nixon put it in a cabinet meeting in the late-60's, "We are all Keynesians now."

The problems with the defense buildup are two fold. One it redistributes wealth away from very real, pressing needs--such as healthcare, housing and education and infrastructure, roads, bridges--that are too costly to fund any other way than with national tax revenues. Two, military Keynesian-ism creates a powerful ruling caste of top brass and defense contractors that has the ability to shape policy to suit its interests, interests that are often not synonymous with economic good sense and social justice. Under military Keynesian-ism large sectors of the economy become off-limits to civilian control. Competition is minimized since defense contracting epitomizes the monopolictic impulse of capitalism. Waste and corruption thus become rampant, and the resources that are wasted are too often converted into high priced military hardware designed to fight the last war--in our case against the USSR--that sit gathering dust, and maintenance costs in one of the 740 US military bases scattered all over the globe.

4.) Finally, the notion that the practice of supply side economic ideas built the boom in the 80's--"Reaganomics" "trickledown", Vodoo economics--is highly debatable. Ex-Reagan advisor Kevin Phillips, for instance ("Wealth and Democracy"), points out that family income relative to inflation has been stagnant ever since 1973, with the exception of a couple of years of improvement during the Clinton dot.com bubble years. An alternative explanation of the Reagonomics is that the Reagan extripation of the FDR/Truman era's genuine progressive income and corporate tax policies, which undergirded the post-war boom, has created an income distribution gap that threatens to swallow the middle class whole. In fact the amount of wealth --relative to GDP--controlled by the upper 1 percent of the income pyramid has reached uprecedented levels in the USA, worse than even the bad old days of the robber barons in the 1880's and 90's. Reagan-style, supply-side economics has squeezed the middle-class into what is effectively debt peonage and actually reduced the income-relative-to-inflation of the poor and working poor. (see Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickeled and Dimed to Death")

That's progress. That's the model OldCBA'er and Lest We Forget want to sell to the developing world. Good luck guys. South America is already beginning to opt out. The Chicago School's faux "Chilean Miracle" has begotten another socialist president in Chile--shades of Allende, remember Allende?--and the second largest oil producing nation on earth, Venezuela, is firmly in the hands of an anti-laissez faire populist, vive Hugo Chavez!

All is not gloom and doom however: Chavez has set up a program whereby Venezuelan heating oil is given free to poor Americans and Fidel Castro's government is sponsoring Cuban trained doctors who will work in America's impoverished backwaters, the sorts of places rendered off limits to doctors by our wonderful for profit healthcare system.

"Out of that morass of capitalist imperialism emerged crippled, psuedo-independent nations that for survival were forced to rely on inequitable trade relations forged by their ex-colonial masters. The fact that they didn't exactly 'thrive' in the 60's and 70's--or now, really--had less to do with 'Soviet-style' central planning and more to do with the fact that their economies were stunted by a century of systemtatic colonialist under-development."

If you take a look at the article about India and China I cited above, you'll find that the Indian economy was healthier in the years immediately after colonialism than it was in the 60s and 70s.  It feel into a ditch in the 60s and 70s when it decided to follow a socialist path, and it has begun to climb out of the ditch since the 90s, when it decided to embrace freer economic models.

One reason the Indians have been able to make progress is because of the many positive legacies of British colonialism.  Please tell us about a third-world country that was never colonized that is now thriving.  There may be one, but I can't think of one.  I can, however, point to many former British colonies that are now doing reasonably well.  As colonizers, the British were relatively benign.  They certainly did a better job than the Soviets and the ChiComs.

"When WWII ended, many folks assumed that the Depression would come back. With something like 14 million GI's reentering the civilian workforce there was a distinct possibility that the "healty and thriving" US economy would slip right back into hard times.  Harry Truman had to scramble around like mad to keep the old FDR coalition viable in the face of old line GOP that wanted to take America back to 1890's. But Harry managed to pass socialist-style reforms, such as the GI Bill, that redistributed wealth in such a way as to forestall the inevitable next systemic failure for several decades. It was Keynesian-ism,  government "pump priming" and planning that comprise the essense of liberal political economic thought, not capitalism, that built the post-war boom."

When WWII ended, the American economy was pretty much the only one left standing.  Most of the others were devastated or exhausted.  You give far too much credit to government economic planners for producing the post-war boom.  If Keynesianism worked so well in the 1950s and 1960s, why did it suddenly cease working so well in the 1970s?  If Keynesianism worked so well in the US, why was it such a catastrophic failure in Britain?

"The problems with the defense buildup are two fold. One it redistributes wealth away from very real, pressing needs--such as healthcare, housing and education and infrastructure, roads, bridges--that are too costly to fund any other way than with national tax revenues. Two, military Keynesian-ism creates a powerful ruling caste of top brass and defense contractors that has the ability to shape policy to suit its interests, interests that are often not synonymous with economic good sense and social justice. Under military Keynesian-ism large sectors of the economy become off-limits to civilian control. Competition is minimized since defense contracting epitomizes the monopolictic impulse of capitalism. Waste and corruption thus become rampant, and the resources that are wasted are too often converted into high priced military hardware designed to fight the last war--in our case against the USSR--that sit gathering dust, and maintenance costs in one of the 740 US military bases scattered all over the globe."

Yes, I agree that it's too bad that we have to spend so much on the military.  This would not have had to be the case if we hadn't needed the military to defend ourselves against totalitarian socialist and fascist regimes (i.e., regimes committed to central planning).  (Who fears the democratic British?  And NOBODY fears the French, whatever their system.)  The military budget, however, consumes a smaller proportion of the federal budget today than in decades past.  Most of the federal budget today is given over to funding precisely the kinds of entitlement programs you think are so beneficial.  Those chickens will soon be coming home to roost, too, as soon as the baby boomers all retire.

Here's a relatively balanced overview of events in Chile since the 1970s:

http://www.answers.com/topic/miracle-of-chile

CoB Removed wrote:

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Just one note here from the peanut gallery: "irregardless" is not a proper word. It is nonstandard speech. From the American Heritage Dictionary: "Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term. Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel, it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so."

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Lest We Forget wrote:

You will need to explain why Reagan was not only elected but then massively re-elected by the folks he supposedly harmed.

No secret here: Reagan got people to vote against their economic interests by offering them a smorgasboard of "values" issues that took their minds off of their diminishing standard of living, and fed and focused their formerly inchoate fears over the bewildering rate of social change. Reagan, to put it another way, gave Americans something outside themselves to hate and fear.

The same menu, of course, is still being offered up and Americans are still glutting themselves while their economic future continues to wither away: the "right to life", anti-gun control, the dismantling of affirmative action, "tax reform", the "Evil Empire," "getting government off people's backs," the fight against "reverse discrimination", especially against white men . . .  

Sprinkle all this with a cleverly concealed disdain for anyone not white, affluent and suburban, let simmer in an atmosphere of diminished economic expectations, add a dollop of knee jerk patriotism whipped into being by the egregious revision of the Vietnam War concoted ala "Rambo"  . .  and you  have a heady electoral brew, one that confirms certain American voters in their worst prejudices and parochialism and compensates them with somebody besides themselves to blame for what's going wrong in the world: abortion advocates,  "liberals", feminists, "welfare queens", "black racists" like Jesse Jackson, environmentalists, greedy, corrupt union leaders, etc. Hitler, of course did a similar thing in the 1930's, as did George Wallace in the 1960's.

Bush manipulates much the same language of hatred, bias and distortion as the Great Communicator. His advantage over Reagan is that changes in federal laws governing ownership of media outlets--TV, radio, print--have made it much easier for a small group of conservative media moguls to buffalo voters into acting against their own interests. These laws were signed by Ronald Reagan, right?

Lest we forget wrote:

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Another interesting article on India (and China): http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11571348/site/newsweek/

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Interesting quote from above linked article in Newsweek.

Lest we forget wrote:

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Another interesting article on India (and China): http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11571348/site/newsweek/

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The other India, from the above referenced article: " India?" he or she will say. "With its dilapidated airports, crumbling roads, vast slums and impoverished villages? We're talking about that India?" Yes, that, too, is India. The country might have several Silicon Valleys, but it also has three Nigerias within it, more than 300 million people living on less than a dollar a day. India is home to 40 percent of the world's poor and has the world's second largest HIV population."

LWF ole buddy, you have give to give the Newsweek prognosticators credit. They sure are optimistic, but they do hint at the less than rosy picture painted by UNESCO statistics. Capitalism is and always be a crap shoot however: with all that growth in the urban, literate sectors (about 19.5% of the population) I sure hope India is saving for a rainy day, because, given capitalism's stormy history, it's surely gonna come.

off the plantation wrote:
 2.) The US economy was not "healthy and thriving" before American style socialist interventions such as social security and the GI Bill, not if you were one of the people who did the actual work in the factories, mines and mills. If you were one of those folks, the immediate forerunner of such New Deal reforms was called "The Great Depression"--look it up--one of those periodic catastrophic failures of laissez faire capitalism that occur often enough that many rational observers infer that such failures are systemic not anomalous. There had been similar economic failures in 1919, 1894 and 1877. Two of these were every bit as bad as the one my grandparents lived through from 1929-1941. When WWII ended, many folks assumed that the Depression would come back. With something like 14 million GI's reentering the civilian workforce there was a distinct possibility that the "healty and thriving" US economy would slip right back into hard times.  Harry Truman had to scramble around like mad to keep the old FDR coalition viable in the face of old line GOP that wanted to take America back to 1890's. But Harry managed to pass socialist-style reforms, such as the GI Bill, that redistributed wealth in such a way as to forestall the inevitable next systemic failure for several decades. It was Keynesian-ism,  government "pump priming" and planning that comprise the essense of liberal political economic thought, not capitalism, that built the post-war boom.

Dear Off,

A couple of points on your number two.  (Others have already ably reponded to many of your other assertions.)  The severity of the Great Depression was due to more to inept government policies than to inherent flaws in the market system.  Foremost was the Federal Reserve System, which presided over a one-third decline in the money supply between 1929 and 1933.  Another major factor was a huge increase in tariffs under the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill of 1930; this legislation touched off a series of retaliatory tariffs by other nations that ended up with world trade shrinking by over 80 percent between 1929 and 1933.  You are correct, however, in noting that market economies are subject to cyclical fluctuations, but it is comforting that  70 years have elapsed since the last big one.   I believe that another large magnitude collapse is far more likely to be triggered by misguided government policies than by internal market forces.

Your contention that the economic expansion after WWII was due to new and expanding government programs cannot be supported by facts.  At the end of WWII in 1945, federal spending was equal to 41.9 percent of GDP but by 1948 had dropped to 11.6 percent.   By your logic,  economic activity should have been declining during the immediate post-WWII years.  (Federal government expenditures have subsequently trended upward to their present 20 percent or so of GDP.)  Furthermore, take an earlier period, say 1889-1915 ,when we have reasonably good GDP estimates and  when spending at all levels of government was less than 10 percent of GDP (compared to 30 per cent or so today).   For that 15 year period, annual GDP growth grew at over 6 percent a year, compared to the post-WWII average of  a little over 3 percent.  Thus in the earlier era of much smaller government, GDP would double in a bit over 11 years years versus every 22 years or so during your supposedly golden era of increased goverment intevention.  I would also argue that the growing role of government in the last 50 years has been a drag  on U.S. economic performance.   But I surmise that you would probably give up another percentage point or two of annual GDP growth if only we could confiscate more income from the rich, evil capitalists and give it to those you deem more worthy.

off the plantation wrote:

Bush manipulates much the same language of hatred, bias and distortion as the Great Communicator. His advantage over Reagan is that changes in federal laws governing ownership of media outlets--TV, radio, print--have made it much easier for a small group of conservative media moguls to buffalo voters into acting against their own interests. These laws were signed by Ronald Reagan, right?

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oldCBAer wrote:

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 I suspect you are going to continue to wallow in misery here among the retards. 

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