Speaker: Mike Meeropol
On Sunday night, Mike Meeropol, author of "Surrender -- How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution" and Professor of Economics, W. New England College, suggested what economic policy should be like in order to achieve equitable income results for all Americans.
Meeropol explained to an interested crowd that most of what they knew intuitively about economics was right, and most of what they'd been taught was wrong. Conservative economics has several counterproductive and wrong-headed concepts that stand in the way of achieving the kind of social justice envisioned 50 years ago in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Article 23, Section 1: 1998 was the 50th anniversary.
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
When such ideas are presented out in the world, the right wing has a standard set of critiques (following) that are based more in myth than in fact or even tested economic theory. Any plan to provide the kind of economic justice stated by the Universal Statement of Human Rights, they say, is a pipe dream.
- American opinion leaders believe that goals for a just economic society can only be achieved indirectly by supporting entrepreneurs. The success of entrepreneurs guarantees the success of workers.
- Any guarantee of jobs or of minimum salaries will interfere with incentives and therefore by the Law of Unintended Consequences will lead to fewer jobs.
- Medicare or other health care policies allowed over-consumption because health care was subsidized, and this led to decreased availability because of increased costs.
- Incentives are the key, and anything that interferes with incentives destroys the very thing that we are seeking to produce.
- Government produces nothing, and so it must take from the producers to achieve ends.
- Government borrowing will come from he same pot as investment, and too much borrowing will reduce the amount of private investment.
- There are no really free purely competitive markets. Many private sector activities are rigged. Without real competition, most of the assumptions behind conservative economics are invalid.
- There are motives other than narrowly conceived personal economic ones.
- Prisoners dilemma: individualistic decisions often are poorer than if cooperation occurred.
- Government is not always the least inefficient producer, as the FAA and the TVA have shown. Waste and inefficiency by government providers occurs when they are not held accountable. Thus the answer is increased accountability.
- Government should be an expression of our nation's collective will. Money interests get greater access and thus greater influence.
- Private costs and benefits do not reflect social costs and benefits.
- Full employment results in little inflation due to international competition.
- Government borrowing often has a positive rather than negative impact. Borrowing that leads to increased productivity is like borrowing for a college education.
The evidence is not clear that taxation and redistribution cut incentives and that the bad things that are supposed to follow will follow.
Productivity increases were lower after the tax cuts during Reagan than before, when taxes were allegedly so high as to inhibit incentives.
If the conservative ideas about income and welfare were correct, then states with the higher payments would have higher divorce, out of wedlock births, etc., which is not true at all.
When Greenspan finally dropped interest rates, real economic growth occurred, with full employment and no inflation, in direct contrast to conservative predictions.
Good economy caused the deficit to disappear, not the other way around. The good thing about the latest 3 years is that the poorest finally are achieving economic gains.
There is no economic reason that a full employment budget cannot be achieved. There are, however, political reasons, and so the solution is political. The power of the powerful can be opposed by the politics of the many.
