Reagan was never right about anything, partially or otherwise. As detailed in Stockman's book, numbers were created out of thin air, then modified to comply with political dogma. Famously in one instance, a major component (defense spending increases, if I remember correctly) were multiplied by 4 just because Reagan misunderstood a number as being yearly, instead of the sum spread over the course of his first 4 year term, and no one wanted to call him on it.
In the course of it all, the interest on the debt alone rose to a yearly amount ($138 billion in 1987) greater than the original budgeted defense budget ($136 billion in 1980 - One has to qualify that, since there was so much off-budget...but I don't want to get into the whole Bush black-ops thing.)
My point is merely this. What we (USians) have had in the last 28 some years has not been government. It has been manipulation of assets for the monied class, it has been a continuous death-rattle reaction to the humiliation of losing an undeclared war in Viet Nam, and it has been hopefully the last desperate gasp grasp for riches by those who see that the arc of history is not going to go their way...but it hasn't been 'government'. Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.
Frank Delaney ~ Ireland
It is like saying that, given the root of the word 'govern' is Latin and Greek, 'to steer', that they did govern by steering us and our future into the rocks. Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.
they did govern by steering us and our future into the rocks.
I can't talk about him anymore. It is not healthy. Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.
The point of my question was precisely to say, however, that nationalisation is not a panacea. We should be talking about what it should set out to do, what are the right policies, what rules should be followed, what best management practice should be adopted.
Taking pot-shots at the guarantor of final resort, when private interests have shown massive irresponsibility seriously threatening ordinary people's livelihood, is kinda misplaced, imo.
The US approach is a moral, financial and medical disaster for most of the population, and hardly seems like something to aspire to.
It seems bizarre to me that so many people are claiming that the private sector is still de facto better at business than government is, when the last two centuries have proven otherwise over and over.
The private sector is better at profit, but it certainly isn't better at providing consistent high quality services. It may provide better services sometimes, but only under very specific democratic and legislative conditions.
Otherwise the tail wags the dog right off a cliff and no one wins - the business sector least of all.
It's a mistake to conflate the systems of nationalized healthcare provision present in the UK and Spain with the system of nationalized health insurance that France and many other EU countries have.
And the French system generally comes out on top in surveys of national healthcare systems. And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
On the more general point I would agree that there is nothing worse than a public sector monopoly except a private sector monopoly and I would always want key infrastructural resources to be in public ownership and control, particularly when it is dysfunctional or uneconomic or environmentally undesirable to have competing infrastructures.
If the current financial melt-down has taught us anything, it is that key parts of the financial infrastructure have become so strategically indispensable and vulnerable that they also need to be taken into public ownership to prevent some of the dysfunctional behaviours which precipitated the meltdown.
I am not enough of a financial expert to delineate precisely what the scope of that public ownership needs to be - it need not, for example, include many smaller retail banks, mortgage institutions, credit unions etc.
However once a bank becomes "too big to fail" it also becomes too big to regulate effectively, and thus must either be broken up into smaller components or taken into public ownership.
Even market ideologists who extol the virtues of competition have to accept that that model only works when there are sufficient players in the market to create real price competition and where the more inefficient or less innovative players have to be allowed fail for the good of the consumers within the whole system.
The reality is that big business is all about stifling competition by gaining near monopoly control of certain segments and thus being able to dictate prices. Unless the regulatory environment can prevent this happening, public ownership is the only alternative.
The problem in todays globalising economy is that many corporations are bigger and power powerful that the states which are supposed to be regulating them, and even in the US the bigger businesses wield so much lobbying , media, and political power that they are effectively beyond regulation or fair competition.
In the meanwhile the political ideology of free market competition is still rooted in the economic realities of 50 or 100 years ago or of smaller businesses now.
My only concern with the nationalisation route is that managing such huge complex and specialised businesses is beyond the competence of most Civil Servants and the comprehension of most politicians and their constituents. We are thus in danger of replacing a fundamentally dysfunctional private sector system with a badly managed public one.
We thus have two imperative:
The purpose of my intervention is to draw attention to the fact that running a major bank - or an entire banking system - is a non-trivial management challenge which politicians will tend to run away from because it could involve unpopular decisions and make them vulnerable to their electorates - who understand high finance even less.
Rather than having an ideological lets nationalise/ no you can't debate, it may be helpful to identify more precisely the dysfunctional aspects of the current system, the the parts which need more public oversight or outright control, and in particular the skills, structures and systems required to exercise that oversight/control more effectively.
The public will not want to be duped into "socialising the losses, after the profits have been privatised" and being left with the shell of a system which is poorly understood and doesn't work very well in the first place.
Long term we may well need entirely different systems and processes - on the lines advocated by Chris Cook - in any case, so now could be a very bad time to be taking on huge contingent liabilities in return for a business model which no longer works.
Ireland has Nationalised Anglo-Irish bank, whilst being adamantly opposed to nationalising the big two. The "social partners" are now going to be asked to accept major wage cuts and cuts in public services to generate a minimum saving of €2 Billion p.a. (and rising) in order to reduce our public sector deficit from 10% to 3% over the next few years.
The Unions are bound to ask for a quid pro quo- if workers are to make such major sacrifices what guarantees do they have that they will also be the major beneficiaries when the economy turns around?
Some kind of corporate partnership and profit sharing model seems to be required - and Chris would be a great person to input into that design process. I'm thinking of writing more considered piece as a LTE,op ed or other intervention into the Irish debate, and if I do I will of course also publish it here. notes from no w here
Can I point out that no-one appears to have any clue what the long term consequences of what Chris advocates would be?
I do, and I've said it often enough.
Personally, I don't think much of the long-term consequences of the existing system. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
