Capitalism is so successful an economic system partly because of an internal discipline that allows for loss and even bankruptcy.
Except, as Nicholas Kristoff points out, when capitalism's internaldiscipline breaks down as it has in other countries and now in America. American capitalism? Guilty as charged.
As Lawrence Summers, then a deputy Treasury secretary, put it in a speech in August 1998: “In Asia, the problems related to ‘crony capitalism’ are at the heart of this crisis, and that is why structural reforms must be a major part” of the International Monetary Fund’s solution.
The American critique of the Asian crisis was correct. The countries involved were nominally capitalist but needed major reforms to create accountability and competitive markets.
Something similar is true today of the United States.
So I’d like to invite the finance ministers of Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia — whom I and other Americans deemed emblems of crony capitalism in the 1990s — to stand up and denounce American crony capitalism today.
America suffers from a whole cadre of people, earnestly ignorant, who decry socialism. The truth, of course, is that the years during which America flourished were marked by a pretty healthy balance of capitalism and socialism -- of prosperity and social justice. As has been demonstrated, that balance was upset during the Reagan administration and resulted in the crash of 2007.
The perps and their political supporters are to blame for what America is going through now, not the protesters in lower Manhattan and around the world. The threat doesn't come from protesters, as Kristoff reminds us, "it comes from pinstriped apologists for a financial system that glides along without enough of the discipline of failure and that produces soaring inequality, socialist bank bailouts and unaccountable executives."
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We don't see much internal discipline in the offices of capitalism. Where we see discipline applied, often cruelly, is on those who are trying to clean up the system.
... Veering around police barricades, anti-Wall Street protesters held a late-night march through Oakland streets, a day after one of their number — an Iraq War veteran — was left in critical condition with a fractured skull following a clash with police. ...
... In Atlanta, police in riot gear and SWAT teams arrested 53 people in Woodruff Park, many of whom had camped out there for weeks as part of a widespread movement that is protesting the wealth disparity between the rich and everyone else. ...NYT
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Detailed inside view of the protests -- one is coming up on this blog as soon as it's transcribed -- show that the protest movement itself has a remarkable, almost uncanny, internal discipline.
