Deliver us, O Big Cheese, from fundamentalists of every stripe. The boon of an unfettered market is as illusory as a workers' paradise. Government regulation is the only margin of protection we enjoy from the circling boardroom wolves. Greed not only "works", as Gordon Gecko noted, it eats.

No; it didn't "hit the spot," because it didn't explain why neoliberal economists won the battle.

Aside from the usual time-honored generational struggle in the academy, I wonder whether the change can be laid at the feet of Samuelson and the attempt to rationalize -- make mathematical if not scientific -- macroeconomics.

Did all those abstract higher math formulas and pretty charts always come out in favor of the neoliberals? Did the abandonment of all interest in philosophical theory in favor of the study of minutiae doom liberal economics?

Remember Henry George? Probably not, unless you are a specialist on 19th Century economic fads. Why doesn't he have a big following, his ideas made a lot of sense to a lot of people at the time? (For those who want a quick overview - tax land).

Henry George failed to attract the big money who would fund the institutes that would push his ideas.

On the other hand Hayek, Rand, Friedman and Greenspan attracted the big money industrialists who realized that their libertarian fantasies would be a useful cover for their real program of enhancing plutocracy. So they set up Cato, Hoover, Hudson, Manhattan, etc. and hired staffs of useful idiots to promulgate "free market" nonsense. While this was going on these captains of industry went to work on their real agenda - cutting taxes (for them) and getting preferential legislation passed.

Michael Lind should realize that this is how the game has been played, he's been off in the wilderness for years. Is Scaife paying his salary? Bad ideas persist when shills are paid to promote them. This was not a battle over ideas, any economist with real left leaning, populist, ideas wouldn't find employment.

Princeton may be better than Chicago, but not that much. There are no radical economists in mainstream institutions.

Mr. Lind, Wikipedia has some good quotes from de Tocqueville on Associationalism. Do you have any suggestions about further reading on this, or is "Democracy in America" as good a source as any?

When exactly between World War II and 1980 did individuals who were orthodox economic libertarians on all issues except taxes and redistribution overthrow the market-regulating New Deal liberals and take over, calling themselves "mainstream liberal economists" when they were neither mainstream by the standard of public opinion (which has always been fond of New Deal programs) nor very liberal.

In the Thirties, after the Great Depression, capitalism had a rival, Soviet Communism, which had not yet lost all of its luster as a pole of attraction. Although in hindsight, one can now perhaps discern the seeds of this system's collapse in its beginnings, this was by no means clear to everyone at the time. In less polite terms, capitalism was scared shitless.

Roosevelt therefore had a freer hand to move in the intervene-in-markets direction than any other president before or since. He could make the argument that he was saving capitalism from itself, and the argument resonated. For a number of years, in fact, it had no effective counter.

After the war, as the tarnishing of Communism continued apace, and its reality became more widely known, it of course occurred to the capitalists and the economists that "we don't need to do this shit anymore." They were able to gin up a campaign that tied the New Deal to the increasingly ugly mess that the Soviets had made of their system. Even so, this took decades to bear fruit. Defeating the New Deal was a process of erosion.

Little by little, memory eroded, until we get to where we are now, where popular commentary treats the New Deal and Stalinism as one and the same thing.

Thus the Happy Middle Ground that was the New Deal was possible only so long as another pole to its left existed with enough good reputation to achieve plausibility as a threat. But the capitalists were still in power, and able to reassert the old nostrums once the threat became implausible and worse, laughable.

In a paradoxical sense Soviet Communism did achieve a workers' paradise - just not in the country it was ruling. For good reasons liberals have never been too comfortable with this argument, which puts them in an ambiguous moral position, but it happens to be true. Of course the morality of the offshorers, the outsourcers, the child-labor promoters and the rest should also be subject to question, but that is a political question.

recall too the plot by leading oligarchs to plan a fascist coup by marching on Washington and installing an advisor to make all of roosevelt's decisions.

i just posted the bbc documentary on this on my blog, it's about two/three down, in three ten minute chunks.

fascinating.

david-sullivan.blogspot.com

1947's Taft/Hartley eliminated the unions "countervailing" power to protect labor's share of corporate revenues.

Ike's fifties tax "reforms" eliminated the code's progressivity with its associated redistributon of wealth.

The 90s bipartisan free trade policies completed Taft Harley agenda by not just depressing wages but actually eliminating them along with the outsourced jobs.

The resulting three decades long decline in inflation-adjusted median income went unnoticed by a "Reagan-democrat" working class distracted by the Rights, and the MSM's, cynical deployment of divisive value issues and the credit card industry's provision of credit which artificially delayed the coming further decline in working class living standards by providing usorious and ultimately unrepayable loans e.g.the sub prime ones now indirectly boosting the national debt . Which will further deplete the resources available to coming generations of workers.

It's obscene.

I'm sure I'd like what the author has to say...if only I were bright enough to decipher it all. Can someone translate this into intelligible layman's English for me?

Very good analysis, in my opinion. I think the collective analysis here quite accurately describes what happened on the intellectual level. Consider also, though: what in the world happened at the grass roots level? Why do so many workers vote for politicians who support those who exploit them? Quite simply, it is because Joe Worker despises gay rights. He sees the parades at Mardi Gras, and it makes him puke. He opposes affirmative action because he believes it hurts him and his family and his son who is trying to get a job as a fireman. He believes that abortion is murder. So, he holds his nose and votes Republican, and we again get the country club crowd who provide lip service to Joe. Joe is voting against the liberal's social agenda more than he is voting for the Republican money grabbers. The intellectual wing of the Democratic Party (about 90% of you who read TPM) looks with distain upon the working man. You think he is an unelightened dummy. You think a person simply must go to school at least 16 years, preferably 20. You sent Joe to Vietnam while you took a draft deferment or got into the reserves. Did you know that 25% of the deaths in Vietnam were black men? You have been too honest, you don't like Joe and he has played enough poker to read you like a book. The right wingers, on the other hand, are much better liers.

Flavius,Ellen and JonF: I appreciate your measured and thoughtful responses to my blurb. Flavius, I pretty much agree with your response. The whole John Kerry episode still astounds me. Those politicians who have military experience usually get a point or two up on those who didn't serve. Somehow, the real veteran who won the Silver Star and 3 purple hearts lost points to the one who, essentially, was a draft dodger. Ellen, there was real racism regarding the military draft and the MOS's that were handed out during the Vietnam War. Black men died at considerably higher than expected rates during the first years of the war, then the numbers became more level. One reason is because blacks were over represented in the combat units. The combat units suffered the greatest losses in the early years. After Tet, the enemy almost totally changed its tactics. They almost quit confronting our combat units and instead used ambushes and rocket and mortar attacks, which resulted in many more deaths in and around the base camps. Back then, the local reserve systems were controlled by the local community leaders. There was profound favoritism given to the sons of the elite. That favoritism caused a lot of political flak, and the draft's lotery was installed in 1970, but the favoritism was not eliminated. A soldier's MOS, which you probably know means "Military Occupation Specialty" was what determined a soldier's job in the military. Each soldier usually went to a short military school to earn his MOS. Assignments to those schools were hand picked by humans and back then a well placed phone call by a person with the right influence would always (yes always) get that soldier into the school he wanted. The sons of the "lower class" fought that war. The sons from the "middle class" were often drafted, but usually able to get less dangerous assignments. The sons of the "upper class" usually stayed home. And, that was true almost universally, unless an individual made other choices voluntarily. JonF, your suggestion to drop into a middle class bar sounds good. I may do that tonight. I play a lot of poker in them, and you are right, the patrons aren't dumb, and they aren't really conservative. So, why do they so often vote for the right wing? One significant reason, I strongly believe, is because the very educated, whether left or right, look down on the less educated. The less educated know they are looked down upon and they often vote for negative reasons, rather than positive ones. And, those in the worker's bar usually associate the highly educated with the left. I think the working class has been fooled by the right wing. I think the working men and women sometimes don't listen carefully to the left, because they perceive the left as the intellectual crowd that looks down upon them.