A Liberty Report Card

The Economist this week celebrates its 160th anniversary by publishing a useful and thought-provoking survey on the progress of liberty. Includes a cheerful rundown of the salutary effects of liberalism, an ambitious freedom agenda for the rich countries, and a perhaps surprising warning about the biggest threat to further liberalization:

[T]he main dangers to the success of capitalism are the very people who would consider themselves its most ardent advocates: the bosses of companies, the owners of companies, and the politicians who tirelessly insist that they are ?pro-business?. At the intersection of these groups lies most of what is wrong with capitalism, and the best opportunties to make that system even more successful than it has been thus far.

Comments

[Anonymous]

"T]he main dangers to the success of capitalism are the very people who would consider themselves its most ardent advocates: the bosses of companies, the owners of companies, and the politicians who tirelessly insist that they are ?pro-business?."

so true...

Bosses: CEOs and other company employees employees who rip off the capitalists, employees who feel entitlements to an increase in marketprice value of their stock, etc.

Owners: Who sit on their duff while the workers exploit the capitalists. Such it is for the "democratization" of the marketplace, which has increased corruption and corporate crime while creating irrational mania and bubbles by day traders seeking 2000% profits in two weeks, etc.

Pro-business politicians: Such fools are usually pro-business and anti-market -- and advocate the "democratzation" of the market so that every joe schmoe day trader is now a sheeple stockholder, who obscure markets with "transpency" legistation, who prime the pump with massive government spending and a central bank cranking out dollars, who promise the workers entitlements based on market growth, etc.

Capitalism will be murdered by democracy, while democracy will devolve as usual into autocracy. The Left will be happy, and so will the Right. The poor as usual will be the ones shit on.

[I've Got a Name]

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[david f]

it's always fun to see the economist, that pro EU rag (= anti Liberty; anti free-trade; anti individualist; pro conformity; pro harmonization) talk about freedom and globalization.. sorry. that's globalisation and harmonisation. sorry.

although the distinction "pro business vs pro [free] market" could be a useful one.

cheers,
drf

[E.Doolittle]

The rayn in spayne stays maynly on the playn.

[Bakhaus]

Ayn Rand said it: "Capitalism's staunchest defenders are never the capitalists themselves."

[Mark]

"although the distinction 'pro business vs pro [free] market' could be a useful one."

It's an import one. Many people have been fooled by the big lie that business and free-market capitalism are the same thing.

Business owners and managers, of course, want us to think they are free-market capitalists. On the other hand, anti-capitalists---Marxist and otherwise---want you to believe that all the rotten things businesses do are examples of capitalism gone bad.

Neither of these things is true, of course (with, perhaps, a few exceptions). Business owners and managers do rotten things for their personal enrichment. This includes trying to subvert capitalism whenever they can make more money some other way. Free market competition is a ruthless battle that never ends. Naturally, business folks hate that.

(Actually they love it wheh they're buying stuff and hate it when they're selling...just like the rest of us.)

The threat to free-market capitalism from Marxist college professors and anti-business celebrities isn't very great unless they get a lot of help from Enron executives...

[Anonymous]

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Command_Corporations.html

---
But do we really live in a market economy? When we look at the pattern of economic transactions in our modern market economy, the striking thing is how large a proportion of transactions do not pass through anything like a market.

In any given year more than three out of every four workers do not go on the labor market: they keep working for the same organization that they had worked for the prevous year, doing much the same thing, at much the same wage. When they do change jobs, they are at least as likely to change jobs within the same organization as to get bid away by another offering them a higher wage (or fired by the first as not worth their pay).

Within the production side of the economy the overwhelming proportion of movements of goods and the provision of services takes place within a single corporation: one branch or division providing something of value to another branch or division, with no money changing hands. Microsoft's application developers do not sell their products to its marketing division. Different branches do not bid for and buy the daily services of the corporation's top managers. Within each of the corporations in our economy there exists not the spontaneous division of labor produced in an unplanned fashion by the invisible hand of the market, but a planned and organized division of labor.

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