Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy
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He's a master of weasel language, to the effect that he can deny ever having made a solid statement about anything. You'd be hard pressed to ever find a quote of him saying what "should be" in clear, actionable terms. You will however find post-hoc rationalizations, in abundance. He has extraordinary hindsight.
I am also not convinced about the democracy part during the 'golden age' - once upon a time you had unelected bureaucrats and union bosses who would do the decisions (you have some of that in the EU now). Also mighty Goldman Sachs didn't enact Glass-Steagall - you need a government for that.
As the Euro crisis began to cause political instability they've backed off a little, but they took their single mandate very seriously and stuck to their "no fiscal stimulus" guns for a very long time during the crisis.
Except they got their start by preaching monetarism as an appropriate response to the 1970s oil crisis ("inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"). That was pretty much the economic equivalent of prescribing leeches and blood-letting to fight cancer.
Eventually the oil crisis subsided (for no reason relating to monetarism) and they took credit for that.
Ironically the choice to shift the economy to be oil dependent from coal dependent in the first place was done in order to shift the country from dependency on labor (coal required far more labor to mine but could be done locally) to dependency on the middle east, which was seen as more easily controlled:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/how-coal-brought-us-d...
"once upon a time you had union bosses who would do the decisions"
Yes, we shifted from having representatives of people who worked for living makingd policy decisions to representatives of people who own for a living (bankers, etc.) making policy decisions.
People who own for a living generally think that that is a bad thing.
" What happened is that large parts of the population—which had been passive, apathetic, obedient—tried to enter the political arena in one or another way to press their interests and concerns"
vs.
" There was a lot of elite discussion across the spectrum about the danger of too much democracy and the need to have what was called more “moderation” in democracy, for people to become more passive and apathetic and not to disturb things too much"
Basically, we want more people who believe in what we say to be involved.
https://reason.com/archives/2017/05/31/noam-chomskys-venezue...
Chomsky is pretty virulently anti market and anti capitalism. His linguistic genius does not give him authority when commenting on policy.
Basically, he praised Venezuela (and Chavez, and socialism) until it went to crap, and then blamed the capitalists and the fact that they did not implement "true" socialism (whatever what means) as a reason for why he was never wrong.
"Speak up unless you disagree with me."
"the quality of appealing to or being aimed at ordinary people."
The article says that he's arguing against populism when it supports Trump or Marie Le Pen. But now he want an engaged electorate. You can't really square the circle. What I hear is "We want more people who support the right thing to vote."
He wants democratic socialists to embrace populist rhetoric and use it to push their agenda, because he prefers that agenda to that of Trump.
Yes they do; first, socialism is, in it's origins, radically democratic. The anti-democratic offshoots of socialism do not define socialism.
Second, and more to the point, democratic socialism is, itself, a distinct political movement (it happens to be both democratic and socialist, but even if it wasn't democratic socialism would exist as a distinct thing.)
> Bernie Sanders doesn't understand basic political terminology.
Clearly, he does far better than you do.
Don't we all?
> Basically, we want more people who believe in what we say to be involved.
No, actually, the argument he makes isn't about who should be politically involved, it's about how those people ought to be served.
You know that you're being incredibly condescending right now? People ought to be served something they don't choose?
His official stance was that the people who got involved with the far right had legitimate concerns but latched on to a 'solution' that was bad for them (and us) and the left should have done a better job of co-opting them to their cause.
I don't know if you've talked to many among the far right but they're often pretty stupid so pretty amenable to being guided one way or the other depending upon who talks to them first.
"Chomsky is pretty virulently anti market and anti capitalism. His linguistic genius does not give him authority when commenting on policy."
What would make one an authority?
"Basically, he praised Venezuela"
He praised Venezuela cutting extreme poverty from 25% to 7%, which attracted a lot of criticism in America.
A few American corporations lost a lot of money in Venezuela thanks to that diversion of funds ^^.
When the truth came out, his opinion did not need to change. Rather, he would point out that he was right in his position with the "information available at the time".
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-07-01/brull---the-boring-tru...
That whole controversy centers around him pointing out that a book by a guy called Ponchaud which was being used as a pretext to try and go to war was full of errors.
It was full of errors.
For an outline of the points brought forth, you may read this: http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/wma.html
What the article you linked refers to as "full of errors" was in fact a review of the book by Jean Lacouture.
"Real wages have gone down"
Well, how high should they have risen? They can't rise indefinitely. Yet, the products you can buy for the same money have vastly improved. What car could you buy for (the equivalent of) 10,000$ in 1979? Would you trade? All sorts of goods have become either cheaper or better, or have literally come into existence.
Now, you will blame the rise of Chinese manufacturing on these improvements, but then please also consider how much wages have improved for the Chinese. The standard of living is rising across the board, across the globe.
"It all goes in the pockets of a few super-rich"
It's repeated like a mantra on the left, but when do they ever show you the actual numbers? Do yourself a favor and take all the wealth and all the income of the top 10% and distribute it across the other 90%. Now tell me, has the wealth and income gone up dramatically for those 90%? Wealth/Income inequality is a psychological problem more so than an economic one.
Why couldn't they be on par with the rise in productivity? As they did from 1950 to 1970: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6H3OQjdwq4w/T6Hs2Dz3X5I/AAAAAAAAD0...
> "It all goes in the pockets of a few super-rich" > It's repeated like a mantra on the left, but when do they ever show you the actual numbers?
Yes, quite frequently. Here's an article with numbers and a graph: https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/graph-day-1-get-richer/
Because wages are tied to supply and demand, not productivity. Increased productivity will rather lower wages.
> Yes, quite frequently. Here's an article with numbers and a graph
Same fallacy with the percentages: The top 1% clearly got their wages raised (CEOs etc), but in broader terms it doesn't matter much, because it's only 1%. In absolute terms, the sums are not that large relative to the sum of the wages of everyone else. It's a psychological problem, because people don't like income inequality, but economically, it doesn't make much of a difference. This is where the left steps in to gain political capital from a non-issue.
In fact the super rich getting richer will skew the average disproportionately. But not the median. So your point is as invalid as the use of the average for income in the first place.
In fact, neither the median nor the average supports my point, but the share of the income total of those 1% relative to the sum of all incomes.
Did you not notice the sharp inflation-adjusted increase in rents and house prices over the last 20 years?
That was directly a result of rising income and wealth inequality.
Secondly, it's not true that rent/house prices increased sharply everywhere, nor is it entirely due to income inequality between high-earners and low-earners.
For one, we had and have a lot of real estate speculation (a correction of which we experienced in 2007) but we also have policies and regulations in place that ensure the market can not provide for affordable housing. What prevents construction of an apartment highrise in the middle of San Francisco? It ain't neoliberalism, that's for sure...
>For one, we had and have a lot of real estate speculation
Who did you think was speculating?
You ever notice how right-wingers dismiss economic statistics quasi-scholastic talking points, and never show you numbers?
The answer is, an employer will only pay as much as necessary, even if workers become more productive. That's just common sense.
An increase in productivity correlates with an increase in wages only if market demand supports it. An increase in productivity combined with stagnant demand will reduce the amount of labor required, increasing the supply of labor, lowering its price. Is that not obvious?
Do the math again, this time with actual dollar amounts, then try again. Take all the money the top 10% have, then spread it among the rest. Also remember, you can only do that once.
To come to the challenge posed in your comment, let's examine some other indicators of inequality.[2] The top 1% holds around 42% of the wealth. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% holds around 1% of the wealth. Doesn't that seem a bit ... unequal? Of course, to have valid concepts of "top 1%" inequality must of course exist on some level, but the disparity is staggering. There are 160 million people in the bottom 50%, and about 3 million in the top 1%.
The average person in the top 1% holds about $2240 for every $1 belonging to the average person in the bottom 50%. The price of a $1m car to the top 1% is on par with the cost of a current-gen gaming console (~$450) to the bottom 50%, on average.
Even without getting into the top 0.1% and their obscene amounts of money hoarding, this is a lot. We can go there too if you want.
We could also just ask the people who arguably have the best access to such data: the Congressional Budget Office.[3] The graphic on the front cover is enough to illustrate the difference, but you can also go through the findings in the body if you need more convincing.
All of this is freely available on the internet, and found with Google via "total wealth in the us". Either you didn't know this was possible, or you don't want to know the facts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Productivity_and_Real_Med...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._economic_variables_r...
[3] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-...
I'm asking again: What happens if we take the wealth not just from the top 1%, but the top 10%, then spread it among the rest? How much does everyone get? Would it be a life-changing amount of money?
Crunching the numbers, we can determine that the top 10% had $67.15 trillion. If this full amount is distributed equally to every person in the bottom 90%, as the question states (let's call this the "kill the bourgeoisie" scenario), each person in the bottom 90% would receive $235,000 on average.
If we wanted to forcefully distribute the money while leaving the people at the top intact (let's call this "blunt force redistribution") such that the current top 10% has 10% of the wealth, then each person in the bottom 90% would receive $208,000 on average.
I would definitely consider this a life-changing amount of money.
[1] http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/images/wealth/Net... via http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HNONWRA027N
[3] https://www.census.gov/popclock/
Edit: Especially when you consider that this article[4] came out in 2013, a majority of people will be able to 1) basically completely exit debt and 2) start contributing substantially to the economy again. Not to mention afford college, afford healthcare, afford good food for themselves and their children, drop a whole lot of stress, and generally build their lives back up. There would be zero people below the poverty line. Who knows if the traditional refrain of "velocity of money increasing means inflation means collapse" would be realized in such a radical redistribution, and if a sudden and drastic shift such as that would end up hurting more than helping. We can only ever play the speculation game in matters like these.
The numbers in the main body reflect also the worth of nonprofits. Not sure on the proportions on that one, but even if you take it to be 10% of all the wealth (IMO an absurdly high estimate) the number still shifts to $187,000 per person in the bottom 90%.
[4] http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/24/pf/emergency-savings/index.h...
They would receive assets valued at 208,000$ at current (arguably inflated) prices, most of it not being cash. You might expect the biggest expropriation in US history to be somewhat upsetting to the markets.
Now that we've established an upper bound, maybe we can talk about what percentage of that money can realistically be taken and what problems it could actually solve.
Technically true, but the path of this redistribution would be in the form of taxation and offered public services, which is extracted purely as cash.
According to the Obamacare website, poverty levels are around $11,000 per person, scaling sublinearly with the number of people in a single household. If we use that as a baseline, we'd need to tax the top 10% about 5% more per year and redistribute that in cash or an equivalent value of provided services (education, healthcare, etc.) to create a buffer that effectively nullifies the concept of a poverty level. In reality this would likely be applied more as a progressive tax, so the top earners would be taxed more and more benefits would go to the people who are actually poor.
Your point about Chinese doing better is a good one, and it's the central issue. The American working class has taken it on the chin to lift the Chinese worker out of poverty. As a side effect, the American capitalist has done very well. On a global scale, this is probably a net good, but the world doesn't get to vote in American elections, and Americans are entitled to a government that prioritises American citizens' interests over Chinese citizens' interests. The Chinese certainly are prioritizing their own interests... If you want to see what this looks like globally, this is an interesting chart: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21707219...
Another question is: Do you really want to use the same appliance for decades?
The problem of the low-end worker who is stuck with an ever-shrinking amount of jobs with no career-prospects is, of course, very real. However, neoliberalism itself isn't to blame and leftist policy isn't the cure.