Liberalism and the Last Century

A well-written essay, if a little dated(written pre-Bush)

One of the most important aspects I will quote:

"Government regulation. People flirt with lunatic libertarianism... but the Fed, the FDIC, and the FDA are still in business. Laissez-faire capitalism is great for making a few people rich and the rest of the country miserable; if 1890s America is hazy in your mind, you can see the results today in Russia.

Liberal capitalism-- with government regulation of banks, financial markets, and product safety, and social nets and progressive taxation to prevent excessive concentration of wealth-- is simply the most successful economic system yet invented.

Conservatives feel most comfortable in an aristocracy. But aristocratic nations are poor nations. (The conservatives who realize this don't mind it, because they are or feel they should be part of the elite.)

A luminous exception: Henry Ford, who doubled the wages of his assembly-line workers-- earning the scorn of the 1920s business community. Ford, however, saw the potential of a huge class of consumers rich enough to buy automobiles. Liberal capitalism thrives because a huge middle class, as in the U.S., is a better market than a small wealthy elite, as in Brazil."

MY SOAPBOX

Liberal capitalism leads to a large middle class and a bell curve of wealth, which is the key to prosperity. Both libertarianism and communism produce the same net product: a mass of poor and a small elite, the distrubition of wealth looking more like an function of inverse variation.

You say that libertarianism hasn't been tried? Between the industrial revolution and the rise of regulation, it was a lot like the libertarian ideal. The result? A bunch of poor and a small wealthy elite. It's been like that for almost all of human history, up until the developement of the middle class in the 20th century.

And now conservatives the world over are attempting to disband the structures that built the middle class. Good idea. I'll see you in the huddled masses.

This is humanity's first, last, and only chance to succeed. Don't gamble with it, or leave it to some future generation to fix. Please.