The End of Laissez-Faire-Again
Kuttner, Robert
In 1926, three years before the Great Crash and a decade before publication of his own grand synthesis, Keynes wrote a prescient essay titled The End of Laissez-Faire. "Some coordinated act of...
...Peterson, in what seemed to be a masterstroke of prophetic timing, was on the cover of the October Atlantic with a gloomy jeremiad ("The Morning After"), warning that it would be better to tighten belts moderately now than disastrously later...
...Both the economic and political implications of these developments are profound...
...retail 66 • DISSENT price of a Toyota hardly moved...
...is the only western democracy where the government takes no responsibility for registering its citizens to vote...
...As a matter of macro-economics, public spending on, say, infrastructure has another big benefit...
...Supply siders got one thing right...
...rather than using up its diplomatic capital in a hopeless crusade to extirpate the machinery of domestic economic planning, the U.S...
...it only leaves America substantially poorer...
...One aspect of this approach is Motor Voter...
...The Keynesian era enlisted the nation-state to make the "coordinated act of intelligent judgment" —to regulate demand, to channel investment, to broker social contracts between industry and labor, and to prevent speculative excess from wrecking the market itself...
...The bonds would be fully repayable in 1995, and could be sold at suitable discount in current markets, if anyone needed liquid cash...
...He exempted our most socialistic (and expensive) domestic program not out of love for socialized retirement, but because Social Security is simply too well entrenched to oppose...
...q THE IMPORTANCE OF VOTER REGISTRATION In the last presidential election sixty-eight million Americans, or 4.0 percent of all eligible voters, did not cast ballots...
...My favorite piece of debris from Black Monday was the front page article from the Wall Street Journal reassuring the readers that this crash, unlike 1929, would not herald a Great Depression...
...This bit of almost Keynesian heresy ("the Plaza Accord") was devised by the most conservative of officials, representing the conservative administrations of Yasuhiro Nakasone, Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan...
...Peterson's Democratic counterpart, Lester Thurow, argued in his 1985 book, The Zero Sum Solution, that rebuilding the American economy would require increased savings rates, shrunken deficits, and "sacrifices" — albeit sacrifices more equitably shared...
...The system needs a mix of free trade and managed trade...
...Senator Alan Cranston has proposed federal minimum standards for state registration...
...Perhaps the most important reason for low voter turnout is that the U.S...
...it would lower the cost of financing the accumulated debt...
...A House of Cards All of these hopes crashed with the stock market...
...This unlikely outcome both symbolized and prolonged the disastrously misplaced fiscal politics of the Democratic response to Reaganism, which in turn prolongs the ideological paralysis...
...Any of these events might have provided the spark, because it was all too clear that the system was out of running room...
...Before the Civil War, blacks and women were excluded by law from voting...
...There may be a lesson here for some of our more fainthearted Democrats...
...That is troubling, but not by itself crippling, nor the occasion to throw the productive economy into reverse...
...Almost by definition, the policies of regulation, stabilization, redistribution, the recognition of trade unions, and the other tricks in the postwar Keynesian kit, operate within the nation-state...
...stock market kept climbing and foreign investors stayed in, hoping to gain more from stock appreciation than they lost from dollar depreciation...
...Failing to raise taxes and widening the twin deficits only meant crawling further out on an unsustainable limb...
...The spirit of the Plaza Accord was turning frosty...
...1 I 1 55 1 1964 1968 1972 1976 1980 1984 Source: Census Bureau WINTER • 1988 • 71 Party Preference and Voter Turnout By Income (1984 Presidential Elections) Percent 100 - Party Preference Voter "Irkirnout 80 - 80 40 - 20 - 0 Than 5 6-10 10-20 20-60 60+ Than 5 6-10 10-20 20-60 60+ Income in Thousands • Democrat lJ Republican [2:1 % of Voting Age Pop...
...When the stock market crashed, commentators argued whether the proximate cause had been talk of a tax increase—or failure to enact one...
...trade deficit...
...Above all, we need a concerted program of economic expansion...
...All of these dilemmas were gathering force throughout the 1980s...
...But in a porous economy, national governments have far fewer devices to tame the brute energy of the market, François Mitterrand discovered that this constrained French ultra-Keynesian socialism in 1982, and Ronald Reagan belatedly discovered that it equally constrained the American supply-side experiment, on a Monday in October 1987...
...Foreign capital continued financing the twin U.S...
...Most of it stays in the United States and creates jobs in the United States, rather than leaking out to buy imports and worsening our trade imbalance...
...stems from a history of legal barriers to voting...
...Basically, what stands between us and a repeat of the 1930s is the entire structure of a mixed economy which the Journal editorially opposes as an affront to the "free market...
...This scenario was hopefully termed "the soft landing...
...In order to elect a government that will enact the trade, industrial, and other governmental policies required for a healthy economy, we must expand the number of working class and poor voters...
...deficits, and interest rates stayed moderate...
...The original Bretton Woods design called for a true international currency...
...When he announced his capitulation, Reagan, significantly, declared that "Everything is on the table but Social Security...
...highly leveraged hostile takeovers...
...but most of the money should be spent on long deferred social and economic needs...
...The Political and Economic Effect of Low Voter Turnout Although total voter turnout is low, it varies by income...
...Astonishingly, in September 1987, it was the Democrats who voted to tighten the fiscal noose when they devised and sold to a reluctant White House a surprise resurrection of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings bill, whose "trigger" had been declared unconstitutional by the courts in 1986...
...The first step is to register unregistered voters...
...The trouble with capitalism, among other troubles, is that it both resists and requires the discipline of a mixed economy...
...The trouble with this solution is that it doesn't solve the underlying problem of the competitiveness of American products...
...The disgrace of laissez-faire is further evidenced by the fact that the Great Powers are attempting a far greater degree of international economic management than the invisible hand would otherwise condone...
...But that result took four years...
...All of these meant that once the market began falling, investors with preselected sell positions would have to sell, which powered the crash further...
...Fear of U.S...
...Yet, in the shelter of a mixed economy and a social peace, something peculiar happened: Keynes was captured by conservatives, and pure capitalism quietly made a phoenixlike recovery, both as institution and as ideology...
...The rules of the trading system should be revised to acknowledge that national economies can and should commit a modicum of economic planning...
...When the voting gap between rich and poor is reduced, progressive pro-worker legislation is passed...
...If the worldwide producer with the cheapest price gets to dominate the market, then comparative advantage merely means which nation pays the lowest wage...
...Reinventing a stable mixed economy at a global level will prove far more difficult than devising one within a nation-state...
...In the long run, of course, a high dollar only deepened the competitiveness problem and widened the trade deficit, because it made U.S.-made goods dear and foreign ones cheap...
...In most states, registration rolls are periodically "purged," ostensibly to remove voters who have died or moved...
...There is now a dreadful, dismal bipartisan consensus that a day of reckoning is at hand, that the bill for the credit binge of the 1980s, as predicted, has finally come due...
...exports to buy the same quantity of foreign imports...
...In 1984, 88 percent of those who registered voted...
...The result is that the wealthy and Republicans are disproportionately represented in the political process...
...New York estimates found the registration cost was $1.00 per voter by mail and $10.00 per voter in person...
...By the fall of 1987, the available policy levers had ceased to work...
...A modicum of confidence has been restored, and the market seems to be probing for a bottom that represents a bearable drop of perhaps 50 percent rather than the thud that finally marked bottom in 1933—a drop to one tenth of the market's 1929 peak, accompanied by a 50 percent loss in the output of the real economy...
...Absence of a voter registration policy...
...Thirty-second television ads have replaced political meetings and precinct organizing as the means of getting across a political message...
...And thanks to the integrated global economy, even the virtuous nations with high rates of savings and productivity seemed likely to be dragged down into a general cycle of recession...
...nor can it be done on the cheap...
...In effect, the nation-state has lost a good measure of its sovereignty, both to other nations and to private market forces...
...The dollar nonetheless seemed primed for a further drop, making both domestic and foreign investors nervous...
...Country by country, much inflationary pressure can be removed by having enforceable social compacts between industry and labor, tying wage increases to rates of real productivity increases, but also guaranteeing that labor gets something for its restraint, such as retraining opportunities, and pension guarantees, and influence if not partial ownership...
...Further, the major economic powers need to reinvent something like the original postwar design of the Bretton Woods system—not the one that was adopted but the one that was proposed by John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White...
...it would increase the national savings rate...
...Against a context of global laissez-faire, the necessary tools of domestic planning lose their potency...
...reduces political participation...
...The dollar could drop 60 percent against the yen, and the U.S...
...What splendid free-market chutzpah...
...Since low-income voters are overwhelmingly Democrats and low-income voters are less likely to vote, fewer Democrats win...
...Because so many citizens did not vote, the votes of only 32% of all voting age Americans sufficed to give Ronald Reagan a "landslide" victory in 1984...
...It is hard to imagine the Democrats blowing the 1988 presidential election, but the one thing that would increase that prospect 70 • DISSENT would be a platform of belt-tightening...
...Moreover, the few, relatively modest transnational public institutions invented after World War II to stabilize the private global economy—the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Bretton Woods system of currency stabilization, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades—have also lost substantial influence to private market forces...
...Peter G. Peterson, a traditional Republican Wall Street conservative (and one-time Nixon Commerce Secretary), is the grand apostle of this view...
...As a result, America could run a growing trade deficit and a large budget deficit, which would normally lead to a run on one's currency (as befell the French franc in 1982...
...The justifiably celebrated program of farm stabilization, or the regulation of special-purpose financial institutions, or attempts to rebuild uncompetitive industries, are both ideologically illegitimate and economically ineffective...
...Investing in Workers As part of a social compact between industry and labor, and also for the sake of international competitiveness, America needs massive investment in a higher-quality work force and a more productive set of advanced industries...
...The reason, the Journal explained, was that now the country benefited from a long list of regulatory stabilizers and guarantors of purchasing power—federal deposit insurance, regulatory limits on margin, a wall between investment banks and commercial banks, "a host of government income maintenance programs —Social Security, unemployment insurance, and welfare benefits . . ." and the fact that "total government purchases of goods and services have risen to about 20 percent of GNP, from 8.6 percent in 1929, thus providing considerable economic momentum...
...Seventy thousand voters were added to Ohio rolls in six weeks after this program was adopted...
...That cannot be done by worshipping laissez-faire...
...Taxes ought to be raised substantially, and some of the money should be spent on deficit reduction...
...Many states now promote voter registration where drivers' licenses are issued...
...The opposite of laissez-faire is stable, managed growth—and growth with equity, not austerity with equity...
...The best way to do that is to reclaim the tools of a social conception of citizenship and a mixed economy...
...Most past recessions have been set off by central banks worrying too much about inflation and tightening money...
...6. Moving Election Day...
...Reforms That Would Increase Voter Turnout: 1. Election Day Registration...
...As the following table demonstrates, when the voting gap between rich and poor is greatest, conservative officials are elected and the government does not implement policies that benefit workers or the poor...
...The lack of such alternatives in the U.S...
...In 1940 Keynes wrote a little tract titled "How to Pay for The War...
...In the actual postwar Bretton Woods system, as Keynes feared, the debt collector mentality took over...
...The stock market crash was supercharged by many of the recent innovations of laissez-faire financial markets—options in future values of the market itself...
...It would be suitable recompense for a decade of yuppie excess in the name of laissez-faire economics...
...Why Is Voter Turnout So Low...
...Because election day is the primary focus of election campaigns, allowing registration on that day significantly increases turnout...
...But belatedly acting to raise taxes, once the damage had been done, would contract demand and only increase the risk of recession...
...And foreign producers—who managed their production and collaborated with their governments far more than the laissezfaire ideology acknowledged—proved very adroit at shaving their prices and maintaining their market share...
...In Iowa the registered population increased by 14 percent in the four years after instituting the reform...
...During the peak of the war effort, it was over 20 percent...
...We are, of course, only a few months into the Crash of '87, and the long term is fraught with peril, both economically and politically...
...Reportedly, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan kept the crash from worsening only by pumping many billions of dollars of extra liquidity into the economy, pushing down interest rates, and keeping investors from deserting stock markets altogether...
...Today, thanks to the stock market crash, even the tightwads of the German Bundesbank are perhaps willing to take their feet off the oxygen hose...
...Just as French socialists circa 1982 made grim jokes about "austerity with a human face," the 1987 stock market crash seemed to confirm the inevitability of some form of austerity in the U.S...
...Some nonvoters have become cynical with politics based on public relations imagery rather than on well-defined programs...
...Capitalism came out of World War II persuaded that the system itself could not withstand the instabilities of pure laissez-faire...
...However, in 1960 and 1964 the gap between voting rates of rich and poor narrowed, Kennedy and Johnson were elected, and Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were the results...
...In 1980 five states allowed election day registration (Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Maine, Oregon...
...We need to re-create space in which the mechanisms of a mixed economy can function...
...It means getting leading central bankers to agree on a common program of a very liberal monetary policy, which is the one lever that more or less still works if everyone cooperates...
...The perverse logic of "business confidence" lures a lot of otherwise sensible people into following along...
...The Human Serve Fund, a national voter registration group, has promoted voter registration in state agencies such as unemployment insurance and welfare offices...
...If a policy of demand stimulus "leaks out" to buy imports, then a government can put the nation further into deficit and get nothing for its pains but a cheapened currency...
...Politically, the risk is that the Democrats won't be able to think up anything better...
...And as the resurrection of laissez-faire has proceeded, it has put democratic-left parties in a predictable quandary, leaving them far less able to deliver economic well-being to their constituencies, and therefore necessarily weaker politically...
...inflation led the Federal Reserve to tighten the money supply, pushing interest rates above 10 percent and spooking the stock market...
...goods, and thereby eventually shrink the U.S...
...In part, low turnout in the U.S...
...One intelligent proposal, by Professor Paul Streeten, a former official of the World Bank, would create a new lending institution for the Third World...
...Conservative governments have cheered on the deregulation, the privatization, and internationalization of global markets...
...in short, that its sacrifices will be reciprocated with something better than abrupt pink slips and union busting...
...By early fall 1987, it was clear that a cheaper dollar wasn't solving the U.S...
...4. Canvasses...
...The experiment in floating exchange rates has failed...
...5. National Standards...
...It was not only the stock market that crashed in October, but the credibility of an entire generation of neo-freemarket intellectuals...
...With the rise of the populist movement, poor whites, free blacks and destitute farmers began to press their demands through the ballot box...
...The monetary spigot, for the moment, is the one device that seems' available...
...and that whatever we may want politically, there is simply no technical alternative to a period of austerity and lower living standards...
...Such alternatives do exist, but they 68 • DISSENT require challenging some deeply held bipartisan assumptions...
...L sum, we have once again reached the end of laissez-faire...
...As for the problem of paying off the debt, Keynes is again instructive...
...trade deficit...
...treasury bonds, and in the New York Stock Exchange...
...But they wrongly assumed that laissez-faire is the best route to growth...
...are the kind of people who in Europe support socialist or labor parties...
...In the 1930s, the Keynesian lesson was learned at great cost...
...Streeten also proposes that all wealthy nations make annual contributions to the new bank, to reduce the interest costs on new Third-World loans...
...Although foreign private investors holding dollars or dollar-investments could expect to lose something when the dollar began falling, foreign central banks, which were pledged to support the deal, stepped in where foreign private investors got off...
...and it would WINTER • 1988...
...The United States, for a time, was able to defy the Mitterrand dilemma only because the dollar is still the dominant reserve-currency of international commerce...
...After the crash, Gramm-Rudman provided the framework for the long-awaited compromise in which the president reluctantly accepted a token tax increase and congressional Democrats accepted further spending cuts...
...Today, America owes about $500 billion to the rest of the world...
...69 diminish the need for borrowing from abroad...
...The institution would be capitalized by bonds that would be purchased by the rich countries, in proportion to the size of their trade surplus...
...it probably needs the international currency that Keynes proposed, as well...
...Party preference from ABC News exit poll Turnout from Comm data International Comparison of Voter Turnout 100% - 90% II I I 70% BO% - I MEM 50% Belgium Sweden Italy Germany France Britain United States Source: PAW: Onintnn magazine Deo/Jen 1B84...
...In addition to reforming registration laws, making election day a national holiday or holding elections on weekends (many European elections are held on weekends) would increase turnout...
...This meant that even as Democrats began to recover some ideological selfconfidence after 1986, and began addressing neglected public needs such as health insurance or lifetime education, the impulse to spend was nicely short-circuited by the fiscal legacy of Reaganism...
...At the WINTER • 1988 • 65 basic political level, the resurrection of laissez-faire institutions and the rebirth of laissez-faire ideology have gone hand in hand...
...should help devise a system of trade rules that permits planning but limits overcapacity and predatory trade, and demands that trade-surplus nations like West Germany and Japan take more responsibility for balance and reciprocity in the system as a whole...
...In September 1985, however, the finance ministers of the major industrial nations agreed that the dollar was too high, that the growing trade imbalance threatened the very viability of the trading system, and that floating exchange rates cost more in instability than they gained in textbook "efficiency...
...That means reducing the U.S...
...3. Agency Registration...
...For example, during Eisenhower's presidency, the percent of upper-income voters who voted was much larger than the percentage of poor people voting and no major domestic spending programs were initiated...
...Social contracts between industry and labor, public-purpose strictures on private financial institutions, and policies of fiscal stimulus can only work when the polity has a boundary...
...That spooked the market, too...
...In the 1970s and 1980s the gap increased again and there has been little legislative progress...
...Economically, the risk is that the stock market crash finally got Ronald Reagan's attention— but too late, and only to substitute the depressive economics of Hoover for the giddy and unsustainable economics of Laffer...
...72 • DISSENT • Lack of political alternatives...
...Some coordinated act of intelligent judgment is required," he wrote, "as to the scale on which it is desirable that the community as a whole should save, the scale on which these savings should go abroad in the form of foreign investments, and whether the present organization of the investment market distributes savings along the most nationally productive channels...
...the U.S...
...While these devices are no longer legal, voter turnout, as the graph below illustrates, continues to fall...
...We could begin by leaving the top marginal tax rate on incomes of over $75,000 at its present 38.5 percent, rather than letting it drop to 28 percent, which would raise about $22 billion a year...
...I do not think these matters should be left entirely to the chances of private judgment and private profits as they are at present...
...We need to reregulate...
...Thus, there is a very real risk that alternatives to austerity are simply not on the political agenda...
...In 1984, people earning less than $5,000 per year were less than half as likely to vote as those earning more than $50,000 per year...
...With people needing goods, services, jobs, and with production lying idle, there is never a good excuse for austerity...
...The major nations ought to agree to a program of fiscal stimulus and debt relief for Third-World countries...
...Can The Democrats Do Anything...
...has an annual foreign debt-service burden of slightly less than 1 percent of GNP...
...it was not until 1931 that the Great Depression really hit, after President Hoover had acted to balance the federal budget, after the Fed acted to WINTER • 1988 • 67 tighten credit, after unprotected banks began failing, and after trade war broke out internationally...
...Recreating a mixed economy in the current global environment will be harder in some respects, but it is all the more necessary...
...interest rates relatively high and the dollar artificially strong...
...The federal deficit today is about 4 percent of GNP...
...it also designed into the system a bias in favor of growth, by putting pressure on trade-surplus countries to expand their economies rather than pressuring deficit nations to contract...
...Treasury Secretary James Baker was sniping publicly at Bonn...
...the International Monetary Fund became the enforcer for private banks, and inflicted austerity regimes on country after country...
...But in the American case, the government could compensate for the weak fiscal picture by keeping U.S...
...The first requirement is to enlist the cooperation of the major nations to a common program of economic growth...
...Increasingly, the only domestic issue came to be the budget deficit...
...At this writing (early December) a lot of laissez-faire shibboleths have been rapidly thrown overboard...
...When we came out of World War II, it was about 120% of GNP...
...That induced foreign investors, in a newly deregulated global money market, to invest in dollars, in U.S...
...Prior to the crash, in the partisan maneuvering over the Reagan budget deficit, the Democrats got themselves painted into a fiscal and ideological corner...
...computerized trading...
...On the contrary, it meant that it took more U.S...
...deficit, but to an economically sustainable $100 billion or so (about 2 percent of GNP), and not to zero as GrammRudman proposes, which would be severely depressive...
...It is tragic that we have to go through this a second time...
...Several factors have probably contributed to low voter turnout: • The changing nature of political parties and campaigns...
...In 1984 these five states were in the top seven for turnout as a percentage of voting-age population...
...Colorado registered ten thousand voters during the first month of the program...
...This would have the effect Keynes wanted, of having surplus countries contribute to growth rather than having debtor nations tighten already shrunken belts...
...Another round of deficit reduction is scheduled for 1988, and at this writing, no prominent Democrat seems inclined to propose that taxes should be increased not just to clean up Reagan's bookkeeping mess, but to address public needs that benefit the constituents of the Democratic party...
...They add up to a political economy in which the available instruments of the Keynesian compromise have lost much of their potency...
...The global integration of the economy and the abrupt decline of the United States as a hegemonic power have created a series of interlocking political and economic problems that have only been intensified by the second stock market crash...
...It's time to bury laissez-faire again, and make sure that it stays buried...
...After resisting for six years, President Reagan at last blinked and accepted a modest tax increase (in exchange for more spending cuts...
...Indeed, the whole point of a mixed economy is that it allows much of the dynamism of market capitalism, while avoiding the characteristic periodic depressions...
...A mixed economy has never looked better...
...The response of those who did not want to extend American democracy to previously excluded groups was the "System of 1896," which through poll taxes, literacy tests, and "grandfather clauses" limited access to the voting booth...
...If wages are in global competition, social contracts between industry and labor quickly come unstuck and unions are less believable as defenders of workers' living standards...
...In 1945, many contemporary economists thought that the end of the war had to herald a return of depression, but the wartime spending fueled both a boom in consumption, in productive investment, in the training of skilled manpower, the invention of new technologies, and a big spur to demand, which surprisingly carried over into the long postwar consumer boom...
...America needs to abandon its fling with laissez-faire, and go back to the security and dynamism of a mixed economy...
...Growth is better than stagnation...
...This would include public agency, mail-in, and election-day registration, and prohibit automatic purging of the rolls...
...It was a necessary concession to reality—and it bought two more years...
...His suggestion was a program of forced savings, based (progressively of course) on income...
...Austerity would have been the worst possible strategy for paying off the war debt...
...As a result, the U.S...
...The globalization of commerce in the 1970s resurrected the reality of laissez-faire, blurred the memory of its multiple hazards, and weakened the institutions committed to its domestication...
...Continued on page 73) Voter Turnout Presidential Elections Percent of Voting Age Population 70 - 65 - 60...
...In some counties of Idaho and Utah election officials go door to door updating voter registration rolls...
...national debt today is about 55 percent of one year's gross national product...
...We need to bury laissez-faire once again...
...The need to impose fiscal discipline serves as a handy stalking horse for the broader ideological and partisan agenda of continuing to dismantle the welfare state and the mixed economy...
...It was the culmination of several years of Democrats' frustration in the effort to make President Reagan share responsibility for a tax increase that virtually everybody else in Washington considered both inevitable and already dangerously delayed...
...The number of people who vote after registering is very high...
...The trouble with the present system is that planning on a national level leads to global overcapacity and competition to slash wages and profits, which adds up to competitive deflation...
...An American variation could require everyone with taxable incomes above, say $100,000, to put two percent of income and five percent of net worth into Recovery Bonds, at below-market rates of, say inflation-plus-one point...
...But the maneuver bought time...
...Capitalists have the bizarre habit of believing that the cure for panic is recession...
...The enormous cost of television time has increased the importance of money in politics...
...In a sense, both views were correct...
...This instrument would be a cross between a tax and a bond...
...Inflationary pressures in the world economy today are almost nonexistent...
...UAW Research Bulletin, November 1987 WINTER • 1988 • 73...
...the Germans were unilaterally raising their own interest rates and U.S...
...Essentially, the political economy needs to shift course 180 degrees in its assumptions and its policies...
...The majority of nonvoters in the U.S...
...In their new role as champions of fiscal responsibility, Democrats found themselves accepting the premise that any new taxes had to go to reduce the budget deficit, rather than for new spending...
...The world needs to go back to stable exchange rates, defended by the common operations of central banks...
...2. Mail-In Registration...
...It would be even more tragic if Acts II and III were repeated—general depression following crash, and depression leading to war...
...Laissez-faire now stands discredited again, but the alternative to laissez-faire is not austerity...
...Monetarist dogma has been discarded, in the interest of supplying the system with liquidity...
...It was also hoped that the cheaper dollar would lead market forces to purchase more U.S...
...Orthodox economists think that the solution to America's competitiveness problem is simply to cheapen the dollar to the point where our products will sell...
...The U.S...
...It dramatized the short-term, purely tactical nature of Democratic thinking, and the way that the internal legislative preoccupations of the Congress obscured broader strategic imperatives of liberalism...
...This has been especially true in the United States, where our "left" party, the Democrats, have always been ideologically squeamish about challenging the primacy of the market...
...This is also done in Canada...
Vol. 35 • January 1988 • No. 1
