CURRENT EVENTS - May 8-14

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Paine said:
. But the core of neoliberalism is about the belief that markets are generally the best solution and that regulation should be limited to just fixing the worst market failures.

So, it’s more of a market-driven approach than a state-driven one.
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1. If you take out the word "worst" (which I don't think is accurate in any sense), that describes me and Bill.

I think it also describes pretty much everyone with even a faint understanding of post-WWII economics. In other words, I don't think a market driven approach is ideology. I used to think it was, but markets have been pretty conclusively proven to be the best way to prosperity when they work.

2. What's ideological is the frequency with which market failures are detected and the proposed remedies. Conservatives almost never see them, unless it is politically favorable. Liberals try to keep their eyes open more frequently, and apologize less.

For instance: antitrust. Antitrust enforcement should be favored by conservatives, as the goal is to preserve markets and their competitiveness. And once upon a time it was (hence in antitrust law, scholars have historically divided into "pro-enforcement" versus "anti-enforcement" rather than conservative or liberal). But since the 70s and especially 80s, conservatives have been hostile to antitrust. Reagan basically killed almost all antitrust enforcement; it was a dark time for antitrust attorneys.

So the conservative view about this is ideology, in my opinion. That is, conservatives decided to prioritize their skepticism of government over their affection for markets. And that's a consistent theme, yes? The reason that conservatives liked cap-and-trade was that the government wasn't really involved in enforcement. They happened to be right that it was more efficient that way. It more often is not.

3. Anyway, my overwhelming instinct is to solve problems. Which is to say that I try to be as non-ideological as possible. Which is only partly successful, because we live in a society in which solving problems is controversial and thus a matter for politics. It's also true that I have biases and preconceived notions and I make mistakes sometimes and knowledge evolves. So I'm not perfect. Liberals are not perfect.

But I would put my track record up against pretty much any conservative. I'm pretty sure I've been more accurate. Because while we can't ever have perfect knowledge, usually the attempt to do the right thing ends up better than the opposite. There are famous examples of "do gooderism gone wrong." Ezra Klein thinks that's a reason that we can't build stuff today. And it's also true that liberals, before the early 90s, tended to ignore economics and reason on the basis of moral instinct, which is not a good policy approach. But for the most part, taken as an entirety, "do good" regulations outperform the alternatives in the vast majority of cases.

Which is why the GOP tends to attack "regulations" as a general matter. They rarely try to list the problematic regulations, because they are few in number. They inveigh against them in general. That tells me that the do-good approach is generally effective.

4. Labels are just words. I think of myself as a policy pragmatist. That makes me a liberal in our world because, well we all know why. But if you want to call me a neoliberal -- I mean, it's just a word. Where I really push back is in the implicit suggestion that I'm simpatico with the GOP. I have been fighting against the GOP my whole life. Almost literally: I became a Dem at a very young age because I thought Mondale made a lot more sense than Reagan in their debates. I have not only never voted for a Republican; I've never given it any thought.

And I just don't think my agreement that Glass-Steagall was outdated and probably should have been repealed (which was not my position at the time, as I didn't know much then) puts me in bed with Reagan or Bush. I would not have appointed a fucking Ayn Rand disciple without an economics PhD to be the Fed chair -- Greenspan being the person most responsible for the financial collapse. I also think I would have done better with the CFTC/SEC turf war on derivatives, but that might be mere optimism; those struggles are intensely political and really hard to evaluate from outside.

Ultimately, it's the association that galls me. It's just really weird to be told that your political views are the same as the people I've regarded as my enemies for decades. And I'm too smart to be blind to it.

5. Your post above seems to make room for the idea that there can be a policy pragmatism that is distinct from "neoliberalism." If you stay with that, then I'm good. I mean, then we would have to debate who is in which camp, but we can at least be in some agreement as to the framework for evaluation.
 
Paine said:
See, now you’re onto it.

In my view, Clinton and Obama tended too far towards market oriented approaches. This was the dominant consensus of all the smart economists, after all. But this approach has failed. And Democrats’ acceptance of these market “solutions” cannot only be chalked up to GOP opposition.

I can accept that markets are the best way to prosperity in certain areas but not all areas. Certainly not healthcare. I’m for well-regulated and well functioning markets in areas where it makes sense to have markets. Belief in markets does not make one a neoliberal.

It seems like much of your frustration with the term is wrapped up in your identity and work as a Democrat. I certainly understand those feelings. I think we can still use the word neoliberal to broadly characterize a political ideology that emerged out of the post-war liberal order. It’s a big umbrella but it is a helpful one, especially as the crumbling of this order is happening all around us.

Something new will come next, and I’m working for it to not be a fascist nightmare.
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Market oriented approaches have failed? Really?

Health care has never been a good that the free market can efficiently provide for several reasons. Obamacare was never a complete solution and remains incomplete to this day, but obviously it's much improved over what came before (despite GOP attempts to fuck it up).

Another frustration is that folks like me are in favor of industrial policy. And that describes Biden and Obama, too, right? And definitely not conservatives. CHIPs and IRA were supposed to be industrial policy and Trump is trashing them. That sort of active stewardship of the economy is anathema to conservatives, but we might think of it as a correction to the a known weakness of markets -- the inability of a market driven economy to produce strategic results. I think the term neoliberal REALLY misses that aspect of the liberal agenda.

For instance, a lot is made of the entry of China into the WTO. That's when the slaughter of American manufacturing reached its peak. Well, that was 2001, right? If Gore had been elected, there would have been infrastructure development. There probably would have been industrial projects that would help retrained workers get work experience. The "let's retrain steelworkers and make them coders" didn't exactly work because who the fuck wants to hire a coder who learned his trade in his 40s after losing a blue collar job? I've worked with coders like that. They are not good -- but that's because they don't necessarily get a chance to be. They are trained in stupid places like DeVry and tossed out into a job market like an undifferentiated mass. Why is the army so much better at training engineers than DeVry? Because they commit to the engineers' success.

So why didn't we build infrastructure and commit to industrial production after China? Oh, the Iraq War. The point is that because of the nature of American politics, and the incessant desire for "change" or "outside perspectives" (the latter almost always being terrible), liberals never get to complete the agenda. So we got half-assed job retraining after factories left. Because what we actually needed were soldiers.

This is an important difference between liberals and conservatives that the term neoliberal effaces, because it doesn't account for the differences in industrial policy.
 
Ramrouser said:
Thanks for the information. What do you see as the current issue with Boeing? They're on a bad streak.
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I've heard a few pretty good theories, including some articles posted here. By "good", I mean they make sense; I can see the mechanism by which the cause causes the effect. "Woke" isn't one of them. My God, everything bad is caused by woke. Remember the wokeism that caused the ship to hit the bridge in Baltimore? Remember the wokeism that caused the plane crash in DC? That is mind-numbingly stupid. By the way, Boeing is headquartered in VA, not "woke" Seattle.

One good theory that I have heard is that management decoupled from engineering and operations when they moved HQ to Chicago and then VA. Now that doesn't mean the move caused the decoupling, rather it was part of the decoupling. They lost focus on building good planes. Hopefully they can "couple" again. America needs it.

Full disclosure: My opinion certainly has some unconscious bias. In my case, it is the bias of an engineer who has been in development and manufacturing for over 30 years.
 
We've always had government-led industrial policy in defense technologies (read: tech) and medicine. It just took us three decades to realize that our public research investments were a big reason why we dominated those industries, and that maybe we should expand our horizons/

The other reason for the change is the abdication of US private industry in long-term research investment and capital planning. We had a historic tax cut for corporations in 2017 - something that was long overdue from a competitive standpoint. What did our companies do with that money? Share buybacks. You can argue that returning that money is more efficient for shareholders, but that's not how you build new innovation for new industries and processes that drive competitive advantage.
 
Boeing's fall is a familiar one. They hired management who were more interested in propping up the stock price thru buybacks and expense cuts than they were in building great airplanes. You can't keep making great products or technology without the acceptance of short-term risk for a long-term vision that may or may not work out.
 
Paine said:
I can’t help but feel that the industrial policy piece had been severely lacking from the Democratic Party’s political priorities prior to 2020. That is something that has to be consistently messaged and it just hasn’t been, even after the IRA and CHIPS. I don’t know whether Gore would’ve helped had he won in 2000.
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The worst thing that happened in this regard was "I'm with her." HRC was a flawed candidate, but her campaign was worse. And I'm not really talking about the infamous decision to go to AZ rather than MI or WI. I'm talking about earlier, when the campaign defined itself as about making history for women, not policies.

I'm not sure that would have changed the election result, but it certainly did shape the way Dems talked about industrial policy post-Obama.
 
Silence Dogood said:
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You were actually proud to post this?

My God, you are a piece of shit human being.

Can you explain what makes these people different than the hundreds of thousand people from South American countries that seek asylum every year? Trump has put a halt to all asylum requests, yet rolls out the red carpet for these folks. Why is that? How are they different?

And don’t bother with the BS about them getting moved off their land. Aside from the fact there isn’t any evidence that’s happened, the folks who seek asylum from other countries also have no land or place to call home. So there is no difference there.

What about religious freedom? Also a load of bullshit. Like the folks that migrate from Central and South America aren’t among the most openly religious people on earth. So no difference there.

What else makes this group of people “special” enough in Donald Trump’s eyes to warrant the red carpet treatment while folks from south of the border are greeted with a wall and accusations of criminality?

I know the answer. And so do you.

Explain it to me, please.
 
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