Top free market economist recants

Reaganomics architect declares laissez-faire capitalism a failure.

from Clarity Press Inc

"'Free trade' agreements and financial deregulation," says Paul Craig Roberts, "sank the US economy."  This stark judgment sums up the considered reappraisal of unregulated capitalism by the Reagan administration's most visible supply-side economist.

Paul Craig Roberts wasn't just Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, he was, as Ronald Reagan wrote, "the intellectual architect of many of the economic policies my Administration has implemented over the last six years."

Roberts was also associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, columnist for Business Week, the Scripps Howard News Service, Creators Syndicate, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, as well as appointed to the William E Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University. Not only that, he was awarded the US Treasury’s Meritorious Service Award for “outstanding contributions to the formulation of US economic policy,” and France’s Legion of Honor as “the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism.”
 
Roberts, in short, has a history of talking about the economy for and to the highest people, including 30 times to the US Congress. 
 
Who knows what it cost Roberts to reject the neoliberal and globalist view? The passion for truth telling is at a low ebb in America, as payback for doing so mounts on every side. Roberts’ book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, is a must read for those who realize that we must re-think.

This book is a major challenge both to economic theory and to media explanations of the ongoing 21st century economic crisis. It outlines how the one percent have pulled off an economic and political revolution. By offshoring manufacturing and professional service jobs, US corporations destroyed the growth of consumer income — the basis of the US economy — leaving the bulk of the population mired in debt.

Deregulation was used to concentrate income and wealth in fewer hands and in financial corporations  "too big to fail." Bailouts remove financial corporations from market discipline and force taxpayers in the US and EU to cover banksters' gambling losses.

Environmental destruction has accelerate,d as economists and corporations refuse to count the exhaustion of nature’s resources as a cost to them, instead imposing that cost on the environment and on third parties who do not share in the profits. In much of the Third World, the growth model imposes monocultures that deprive people of independence and self-sufficiency

The American people do not benefit. In fact, "Globalism," Roberts writes, "is a conspiracy against First World jobs." In addition to offshoring, business leaders are replacing Americans with foreigners in those jobs that they find convenient to retain in the US.

Fraudulently claiming that they cannot find enough Americans with science and engineering degrees to fill the jobs, they successfully lobby Congress for work visas for foreigners, who replace American scientific, engineering, and technical employees at substantially lower costs, in order to concentrate income and wealth at the top.

No one seems to understand that research, development, design, and innovation take place in countries where things are made. The loss of manufacturing means ultimately the loss of engineering and science. The newest plants embody the latest technology. If these plants are abroad, that is where the cutting edge resides.

According to a new United Nations Development Program report, the US ranks third among states with the worst income inequality, after Hong Kong and Singapore. Clearly in the US the ladders of upward mobility have been taken down. The US is no longer an opportunity society.

There is no economic recovery.

"Economists who have spent their professional lives rationalizing 'globalism' as good for America," Roberts writes, "have no idea of the disaster that they have wrought." As a result, the United States has become a failed democracy. Washington has no concern for the economic welfare of citizens or for their civil liberties or those of its European puppet states. Congress serves the interest groups that control it, and these groups are committed to financial fraud, disinformation and war.

© Copyright 2013 Clarity Press, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca