Envisioning the Future Requires Knowing the Present
By Dean Baker
As every backcountry hiker recognizes, you must first know where you are before you can figure out how to get to where you want to be. While it is important to know where we want to go, progressives often badly misunderstand where we are now.
Specifically, much of the anger of progressives is wrongly focused on the market, as though the market is the source of the troubles in the world. Progressive publications have featured endless diatribes against “market fundamentalism,” implying that the strict devotion to market principles is the core problem that we must counter.
In fact, the market is not the problem. The market is a tool, like the wheel. It makes as much sense to attack the market as it does to attack the wheel.
The problem is in how the market has been structured. The right has used its control of the government to structure the market in ways that redistribute income upward and produce many other bad outcomes, like poverty in the developing world and global warming.
…more…