Via HuffPo:
Francois Hollande's victory doesn't and shouldn't mean a movement toward socialism in Europe or elsewhere. Socialism isn't the answer to the basic problem haunting all rich nations.
The answer is to reform capitalism. The world's productivity revolution is outpacing the political will of rich societies to fairly distribute its benefits. The result is widening inequality coupled with slow growth and stubbornly high unemployment.
In the United States, almost all the gains from productivity growth have been going to the top 1 percent, and the percent of the working-age population with jobs is now lower than it's been in more than thirty years (before the vast majority of women moved into paid work).[...]
The problem is not that the productivity revolution has caused unemployment or under-employment. The problem is its fruits haven't been widely shared. Less work isn't a bad thing. Most people prefer leisure. A productivity revolution such as we are experiencing should enable people to spend less time at work and have more time to do whatever they'd rather do.
The problem comes in the distribution of the benefits of the productivity revolution. A large portion of the population no longer earns the money it needs to live nearly as well as the productivity revolution would otherwise allow. It can't afford the "leisure" its now experiencing involuntarily. Read more here...
In the 1960s, French Marxist philosopher Andre Gorz called for socialists to implement "revolutionary reforms" that implemented de facto socialism by reducing business to the status of civil servants and creating an existential crisis for free market capitalism.
ReplyDeleteThe American left - most prominently Richard Cloward, Frances Piven and Obama advisor Peter Dreier - adopted the Gorz strategy, but spun their "non-reform reforms" as "reforms of capitalism," much like Prof. Reich in his op-ed.
Barack Obama comes from this school of socialism and his "clean energy economy" and Obamacare programs reduce business to the status of civil servants and are causing as crisis in free market capitalism.
What we need are not further "reforms of capitalism," but rather genuinely free markets.
Bart DePalma
Author of Never Allow A Crisis To Go To Waste