The Null Device

After the collapse of communism and the triumph of liberal capitalism, a number of formerly conservative thinkers (of the market-liberal stripe; reactionary religious demagogues don't really count as 'thinkers') have been turning away from 'free market' doctrines; these include ex-Thatcherite John Gray and former Reagan advisor Edward Luttwak, both now vehemently denouncing capitalist fundamentalism, though (at the same time) not exactly lining up behind the new wave of McDonalds-trashing Marxists:
Americans[, Gray writes,] suffer from "levels of inequality" that "resemble those of Latin American countries." The middle class enjoys the dubious charms of "assetless economic insecurity that afflicted the nineteenth-century proletariat." The United States stands perilously close to massive social disruption, which has been held at bay only "by a policy of mass incarceration" of African Americans and other people of color. "The prophet of today's America," Gray claims, "is not Jefferson or Madison.... It is Jeremy Bentham"--the man who dreamed of a society "reconstructed on the model of an ideal prison."`
He used to think that the free market arose spontaneously and that state control of the economy was unnatural. But watching Jeffrey Sachs and the International Monetary Fund in Russia, he could not help but see the free market as "a product of artifice, design and political coercion." It had to be created, often with the aid of ruthless state power... Gray believes that "Marxism-Leninism and free-market economic rationalism have much in common." Both, he writes, "exhibit scant sympathy for the casualties of economic progress." There is only one difference: Communism is dead.
Luttwak affirms, "I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs, because everything that we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency -- love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes."

(via Robot Wisdom)

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