Utopians of the Right and the Left
Posted by Steve Welzer on 06/30/05Communitarians have been called utopians, but a case can be made that the real utopians (in the sense of being hopelessly unrealistic) are the capitalist and socialist ideologues.
The Utopia of the Right is called Objectivism. It is based on the idea that subjective “interference” with market forces distorts markets, reduces efficiency, raises prices, and hurts consumers. By “subjective interference” is meant, primarily, political intervention and regulation.
In theory it’s true that markets would work most efficiently and prices would be lowest if there was no subjective “interference” and all economic actors straightforwardly based decisions on objective market signals. The problem is that the economy is not a machine, it is a conglomeration of human beings engaged in economic activity . . . and so there has never been and will never be pure objectivism. In fact, every economy is (has been and always will be) rife with subjective / governmental / political influence. Under modern capitalism governments make “adjustments” of all kinds to help special interests such as homeowners, the unemployed, low-income workers, etc., but especially give breaks and credits and bailouts and welfare to the corporations and the wealth elites. Libertarians and Objectivists can rant all they want to about market distortions, but they are Utopians of the Right if they believe the elites who ultimately control modern governments will constrain their predilection for mutual aid.
The Utopians of the Left are those who believe that a large-scale, complex industrial economy can be subjectively run by the mass collective they call “the people.” Typical rhetoric: “Under socialism the people would own the major means of production and these would be administered and operated democratically to produce what we need and want.” Sounds good on paper, but the reality is that a society of tens or hundreds of millions of people can’t actually have a collective sense of real “ownership” or a meaningful praxis of “democratic administration.” Socialization of the means of production, when the context is an industrial / nation-state scale, is effectively centralized GOVERNMENT ownership and administration - which has not proved to be much more democratic or liberatory than private ownership.
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Economic subjectivism IS better than acquiescence to blind market forces. But the only realistic context for subjective, democratic decision-making would be community-based economics.
Footnote: A community can exert effective control at a macro level without necessarily requiring public ownership. That’s why Green economics does not need to specify, as a universal principle, social ownership of productive assets. Rather, the principle should be: Let each community decide what mix of public and private ownership it deems best for itself.
are you aware that the supposed intellectual forebearers to today's libertarians - the original laissez-faire, classical liberals -called "French Physiocrats" (they actually were the physicians for the French royalty) suggested that the only form of taxation that was just and would not harm the economy (like a disease) was diverting the positive externalities of enclosing the natural commons?
This same argument was later put forth by Thomas Paine in "Agrarian Justice" and imparted to Jefferson via Dupont...
What sent the study of political economics down the wrong track to it's role today as the "dismal science" was the purposeful (by very powerful interests) conflation of the commons for private capital.
By re-orienting our economics around this principle we can unite the best aspects of left and right within a culturally relevant ideology.
Socialize the positive externalities and privatizes the negative externalities and then people are making purchasing decisions based on true cost pricing within a market and ecological framework.