New book by Dean Baker: Making Markets Progressive

* Book: The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive. Dean Baker. Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2011.

Intro by Dean Baker:

“Progressives need a fundamentally new approach to politics. They have been losing not just because conservatives have so much more money and power, but also because they have accepted the conservatives’ framing of political debates. They have accepted a framing where conservatives want market outcomes whereas liberals want the government to intervene to bring about outcomes that they consider fair.

This is not true. Conservatives rely on the government all the time, most importantly in structuring the market in ways that ensure that income flows upwards. The framing that conservatives like the market while liberals like the government puts liberals in the position of seeming to want to tax the winners to help the losers.

This “loser liberalism” is bad policy and horrible politics. Progressives would be better off fighting battles over the structure of markets so that they don’t redistribute income upward. This book describes some of the key areas where progressives can focus their efforts in restructuring market so that more income flows to the bulk of the working population rather than just a small elite.”

1 Comment New book by Dean Baker: Making Markets Progressive

  1. Øyvind HolmstadØyvind Holmstad

    I’ve not studied at any university, but I think I’ve read that conservatism is basically/originally about creating a strong civil society where the individual is protected from the state’s intervention. Today we can surely sideline corporations with the state!

    This is in my opinion not happening in today’s free markets. The invisible hand of the market existed on the time of Adam Smith, but this was in the time before globalization and WTO. In fact, the invisible hand, which is today cut of, consisted of evolved patterns and languages.

    Thus, to create a “true” conservative community of a strong sivil society, where most important of all the HUMAN SCALE is existing EVERYWHERE, both in economy, architecture, and democracy, we must use the Pattern Technology of Christopher Alexander: http://www.metropolismag.com/pov/20111007/the-pattern-technology-of-christopher-alexander

    Today’s conservatives are fundamentally flawed and utterly bewildered. Although I’ve left ideologies as I don’t know why we need them when we have permaculture and the technologies of Christopher Alexander, I’m from a conservative background and it pains me when I see how today’s “conservatives” are promoting accumulation of capital and other antipatterns that violate the human scale and destroy the civil society: http://permaliv.blogspot.com/2011/10/multilayered-anti-pattern.html

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