Will 2019 Be Year U.S.Begins to Reunite?

Popular Economics Weekly

vox.com

Wonder of wonders, is New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks becoming a neo-Keynesian, New Deal economist? This is the term coined for those younger economists, such as Nobel economists Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz and George Akerlof, who have updated John Maynard Keynes’ New Deal theories that helped to bring us out of the Great Depression and created today’s developed economies.

Brooks isn’t a trained economist, but he has been looking for a new political center in his more recent columns—mostly in reaction to the Trump administrations betrayal of free trade and limited debt, mainstay ideas of the former Republican Party, but also its takeover by the Trump administration.

Brooks said in a recent NYTimes Op-ed, “The nations that have the freest markets also generally have the most generous welfare states. The two are not in opposition. In the real world they go together.”

“What generous welfare states?” Western national governments have stepped in wherever the private sector has proved unable or unwilling to support economic growth and general prosperity since World War II. And it was Roosevelt’s New Deal programs that created social security, unemployment insurance, enshrined workers’ rights, and the modern industrial economy that enabled us to win World War II.

So 2019 may be the year that the political parties and American electorate begin to come together, to show a willingness to compromise their ideals and their convictions in reaction to the “Make America First” doctrine of the Tea Party and white nationalist supporters of the Trump administration.

The newly elected Democratic House of Representatives may be the first concrete result of this trend towards more centrist policies in January 2019 with more than 200 women now in the 435 member House. Who better than women to make compromises in the name of getting things done, as they have done in their households since the beginning of time?

Another sign is the more centrist views of conservative writers that Brooks has cited, beginning with the Niskanen Center, an offshoot of the conservative Cato Institute, which released a comprehensive report called, “The Center Can Hold: Public Policy for an Age of Extremes,” written by Brink Lindsey, Steven Teles, Wilkinson and Hammond. The report is a manifesto for a new centrism based on what the authors call a “free-market welfare state model, says Brooks.

“They want government to protect citizens against the disruptions of global capitalism: “Without strong income supports that put a floor beneath displaced workers and systems that smooth the transition to new employment, political actors and the public tend to turn against the process of creative destruction itself.”

By creative destruction, Brooks means the tendency of capitalist economies to throw out the old to make room for new innovations and industries, regardless of the consequences to workers in the old industries—like manufacturing in the Midwestern rustbelt. The economic consequences have been devastating for those regions, needless to say.

What Brooks and his fellow conservative centrists don’t say, however, is that modern capitalists have become monopolists is almost every sense of the world. Just a few major corporations dominate the old manufacturing and energy sectors. And the new digital economy is dominated by the so-called Silicon Valley Big Five—Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and Amazon—that have almost totally escaped oversight; until now.

This tendency towards ‘monopsony’ in under-regulated capitalist economies—the economic term for employers having excessive control over their labor market—is what led to “global capitalism” and too big to fail multinational corporations.

This is in fact earth shaking news emerging from the past of a Republican Party that created the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and first proposed expanding government-subsidized health care in the 1970s. Let us hope America can return to the two-party system that enabled compromise, a more generous welfare state, and less destructive form of capitalism.

It would be a new beginning for the Re-United States of America.

Harlan Green © 2019

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen