Heilbroner's Blueprint for the Fundamental Transformation of America

[4est_4est_Gump]

The Growing Tyranny of the Political Elite
Jeffrey Folks, AMerican Thinker
February 27, 2013

...

The pattern is familiar with this administration. A small cadre of elite administrators, czars, judges, or politicians -- often just one person -- thinks it (or he or she) has the right to decide what's best for 320 million Americans. Without adequate information, debate, or cost analysis, regulations are written and imposed, and no one, not even the people's representatives in the House of Representatives, has the right to influence them.

Political elites have always existed in America, and during the past 100 years they have gravitated toward the Democratic Party. FDR's "brain trust," which included Guy Tugwell and Hugh Johnson, was just one example. But perhaps no administration in our history has been controlled by elites to the extent that the Obama presidency has. With academics like Cass Sunstein and crony capitalists like those backing green energy projects calling the shots, the elite have stepped in, determined to rule in place of the public will.

What is now happening was predicted -- and celebrated -- over forty years ago by Robert L. Heilbroner, one of the darlings of the New Left. In The Limits of American Capitalism, Heilbroner laid out a plan by which the innately conservative leanings of the American people could be quashed and replaced by the centralized control of a political elite. Heilbroner's book concludes with a chilling vision of the way forward. What he advocates is, in effect, a socialist totalitarian state, where the government controls every aspect of human life. In the name of reform, this statist system would regulate if not nationalize all major industries -- but it would also go farther than that.

What Heilbroner envisaged was the rise of a ruling elite centralized in government, media, and the universities. This group of decision-makers would operate "on behalf of" the public and on the basis of "scientific principles" of social control. As Heilbroner writes, "[n]ot alone economic affairs ... but the numbers and location of the population, its genetic quality, the manner of social domestication of children, the choice of lifework -- even the duration of life itself -- are all apt to become subjects for scientific investigation and control" (The Limits of American Capitalism, New York, 1966, pp. 129-130).

Heilbroner's books were bestsellers in the 1960s, widely read and admired by liberals everywhere. They were, in effect, neo-Keynesian, pro-statist instruction manuals studied by the likes of Bill Ayers and Cass Sunstein, President Obama's tutors in state control and regulation.

Heibroner's books popularized the liberal premise that the political elite has the right and obligation to make fundamental decisions on behalf of the mass of citizens. In doing so, Heilbroner understood, the elite must find ways to subvert the naturally conservative inclinations of the people -- especially those lumpen-headed businessmen whom Heilbroner so despised. Decision-making must be shifted from individuals and elected representatives to bureaucrats and judges appointed by leftist politicians. Public opinion must be shaped and molded by elitist academics and journalists. The will of the state must be imposed, by violence if necessary. This was the future of America, according to Robert L. Heilbroner, and it is the vision of America adopted by those young activists in the 1960s and 1970s who now constitute the leadership of the Democratic Party.

Heilbroner believed that it would take hundreds of years to overturn democracy in America, in part because of the nation's widespread support of capitalism and the country's pesky tradition of individual rights. He noted, however, that the process could be speeded up in the event of a severe economic crisis. Another great national depression or prolonged recession would make it possible for government to enact a series of "reforms" that would shift control from the private sector to government. Government would then control not just major sectors of the economy, but the personal lives of all citizens. Their incomes, their health care, their educations, their home mortgages, their communications and entertainment, their access to news and information would all fall under the control of the political elite. At that point, Heilbroner believed, utopia would be at hand.

Everything that Heilbroner predicted is now coming to pass. Attorney General Holder has waged a virtual war against Arizona's attempt to defend itself against unchecked immigration. Congress has created an office of consumer affairs with broad powers to regulate financial transactions. A European-style bureaucrat has been appointed to direct the rationing of medical services. And the EPA believes that it has the authority not just to police hunting and fishing supplies, but to regulate carbon dioxide, a natural product of the act of breathing.

The preferred modus operandi, in fact, is to appoint a single individual with the power to control some large part of American life. So much power has now been concentrated in the hands of a handful of appointees, most of them reporting directly to the president, that it is now doubtful whether America can still be considered a democratic nation. Government has become the enemy of the people, because it is now in the hands of left-wing elitists who are opposed to traditional American values and who have only contempt for the democratic process.

...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The Man Who Told the Truth
David Boaz
Jan. 21, 2005

Robert Heilbroner, the bestselling writer of economics, died early this month at the age of 85. He and John Kenneth Galbraith may well have sold more economics books than all other economists combined. Alas, their talents lay more in the writing than the economics. Heilbroner was an outspoken socialist; if only a libertarian could write an introductory book on economics that could—like Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers—sell 4 million copies.

Reading some of Heilbroner's essays over the years, I admired his honesty about the meaning of socialism. Consider this excerpt from a 1978 essay in Dissent:

Socialism...must depend for its economic direction on some form of planning, and for its culture on some form of commitment to the idea of a morally conscious collectivity....

If tradition cannot, and the market system should not, underpin the socialist order, we are left with some form of command as the necessary means for securing its continuance and adaptation. Indeed, that is what planning means...

The factories and stores and farms and shops of a socialist socioeconomic formation must be coordinated...and this coordination must entail obedience to a central plan...

The rights of individuals to their Millian liberties [are] directly opposed to the basic social commitment to a deliberately embraced collective moral goal... Under socialism, every dissenting voice raises a threat similar to that raised under a democracy by those who preach antidemocracy.

Few socialists outside the Communist Party are willing to acknowledge that real socialism means trading our "Millian liberties" for the purported good of economic planning and "a morally conscious collectivity."

He was not entirely impervious to new evidence, however. In 1989, he famously wrote in The New Yorker:

"Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won... Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism."

In The New Yorker again the next year, he reminisced about hearing of Ludwig von Mises at Harvard in the 1930s. But of course his professors and fellow students scoffed at Mises's claim that socialism could not work. It seemed at the time, he wrote, that it was capitalism that was failing. Then, a mere 50 years later, he acknowledged: "It turns out, of course, that Mises was right" about the impossibility of socialism. I particularly like the "of course." Fifty years it took him to grasp the truth of what Mises wrote in 1920, and he blithely tossed off his newfound wisdom as "of course."

Alas, in that same article he went on to say that while socialism might not in fact produce the goods, we would still need to reject capitalism on the grounds of...let's see...I've got it—environmental degradation. Yeah, that's the ticket. While he had managed to wriggle free of the ideas he learned in the 1930s, he was still stuck in the 1970s when, like Paul Ehrlich, he issued dire predictions about the imminent exhaustion of natural resources. In his 1974 book An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, Heilbroner wrote, "Ultimately, there is an absolute limit to the ability of the Earth to support or tolerate the process of industrial activity, and there is reason to believe that we now are moving toward that limit very rapidly."

On the big issue of capitalism vs. socialism, though, he did continue his rueful acknowledgment of error. In 1992, he explained the facts of life to Dissent readers:

Capitalism has been as unmistakable a success as socialism has been a failure. Here is the part that's hard to swallow. It has been the Friedmans, Hayeks, and von Miseses who have maintained that capitalism would flourish and that socialism would develop incurable ailments. All three have regarded capitalism as the 'natural' system of free men; all have maintained that left to its own devices capitalism would achieve material growth more successfully than any other system. From [my samplings] I draw the following discomforting generalization: The farther to the right one looks, the more prescient has been the historical foresight; the farther to the left, the less so.

He also noted then that "democratic liberties have not yet appeared, except fleetingly, in any nation that has declared itself to be fundamentally anticapitalist."

May the socialists in Cambridge and Cambridge, and the people struggling to create decent societies around the world, especially in Africa, the Arab world, and the ex-Communist countries take the frank (albeit delayed) honesty of Robert Heilbroner to heart.

http://reason.com/archives/2005/01/21/the-man-who-told-the-truth/print

 

[RobDownSouth]

The cut-and-paste spewnami for Wednesday, February 27, 2013 starts...NOW!

 

[Busybody]

RobDownSouth
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no one reads your shit, NIGGER POOP, so STFU

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

"Socialism—defined as a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production—was the tragic failure of the twentieth century. Born of a commitment to remedy the economic and moral defects of capitalism, it has far surpassed capitalism in both economic malfunction and moral cruelty. Yet the idea and the ideal of socialism linger on. Whether socialism in some form will eventually return as a major organizing force in human affairs is unknown, but no one can accurately appraise its prospects who has not taken into account the dramatic story of its rise and fall.

...

"The Mises-Hayek argument met its most formidable counterargument in two brilliant articles by Oskar Lange, a young economist who would become Poland’s first ambassador to the United States after World War II. Lange set out to show that the planners would, in fact, have precisely the same information as that which guided a market economy. The information would be revealed as inventories of goods rose and fell, signaling either that supply was greater than demand or demand was greater than supply. Thus, as planners watched inventory levels, they were also learning which of their administered (i.e., state-dictated) prices were too high and which too low. It only remained, therefore, to adjust prices so that supply and demand balanced, exactly as in the marketplace.

"Lange’s answer was so simple and clear that many believed the Mises-Hayek argument had been demolished. In fact, we now know that their argument was all too prescient.

...

"But what spokesman of the present generation has anticipated the demise of socialism or the “triumph of capitalism”? Not a single writer in the Marxian tradition! Are there any in the left centrist group? None I can think of, including myself. As for the center itself—the Samuelsons, Solows, Glazers, Lipsets, Bells, and so on—I believe that many have expected capitalism to experience serious and mounting, if not fatal, problems and have anticipated some form of socialism to be the organizing force of the twenty-first century.

"... Here is the part hard to swallow. It has been the Friedmans, Hayeks, von Miseses, e tutti quanti who have maintained that capitalism would flourish and that socialism would develop incurable ailments. Mises called socialism “impossible” because it has no means of establishing a rational pricing system; Hayek added additional reasons of a sociological kind (“the worst rise on top”). All three have regarded capitalism as the “natural” system of free men; all have maintained that left to its own devices capitalism would achieve material growth more successfully than any other system."

Robert Heilbroner, “The World After Communism.”

Gee...

Another Lefty who took a right turn after discovering how wrong he was.

And yet, so many stupid people do not get it and keep voting for more of it...



"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. ... there is only one remedy: time. People have to learn, through hard experience, the enormous disadvantage there is in plundering one another."
Frédéric Bastiat

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

RobDownSouth
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no one reads your shit, NIGGER POOP, so STFU

If they do, it is only to find out what nasty little turd of a remark he has dropped.

The Democrats love this sort of talk towards anyone who would dare to disagree with them and they condone and encourage the antics of their virtual SA members such as Throbbie...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The Federal Reserve increased the money supply by purchasing assets of questionable quality from the banking system. It paid for these assets with cash (an increase in Federal Reserve notes) and received the assets now entered on its balance sheet (mostly mortgage-backed securities and Federal Agency debt). If banks took the fresh money and lent it out to borrowers to spend in the economy, inflationary pressures would build on prices. To avoid this outcome, the Fed commenced paying interest on reserve balances (both required and excess). Banks would hold on to the new reserves, earn a small profit, and improve their capital positions. Even though the interest rate offered on reserves was meager (only 0.25 percent as of today), banks by-and-large chose this path rather than risk parting with their money, and perhaps losing it, through loans to private companies and individuals. It was a win-win solution. Banks received a capital infusion and remained solvent. The Fed “saved” the banking sector while not provoking an inflationary run-up in prices.

The Fed can stave off inflation only as long as the banking system does not make use of its fresh reserves. Luckily, they can just reverse the original transaction to avoid this fate. When the banking system gets back on its feet, the Fed can buy back the reserves that it issued over the past four years by selling off the assets that it owns. This is the standard story from Fed officials and seems to be a rational explanation for how the future will unfold. However, there are two significant problems.

The first problem is how much will the sale of the Fed's MBS and Federal Agency debt-holdings bring. The combined figure of over $1.7 trillion shown on its balance sheet today represents the face value of these securities. I don’t believe many analysts think that MBS have increased in value much since the Fed started purchasing them several years ago. The Fed can only reduce its liabilities by selling off its assets. If the Fed wants to reign in reserves, it needs to offer the banking sector something in exchange—whether MBS or other assets. If these assets fall in value the Fed will have insufficient assets to exchange for the reserves it has created, and the money supply will have permanently increased as a result.

The second problem is what happens if the Fed holds an auction for its assets and no one comes? The banking system was able to trade its poor quality assets to the Fed for high quality reserves. What makes the Fed think, that at some point in the future, they will want the poor quality assets back? A housing rebound might come along, and with it an improved risk-return profile on MBS. Yet, this seems unlikely at this time. Some might say that this problem is really a non-issue—the Fed will find a buyer for its assets, it’s only a question of price. That “solution” brings us back to the previous problem of what low price will the Fed have to accept to sell off its questionable assets.

If the economy improves, the banking sector will increasingly loan out its reserves and bring inflationary pressure to prices. If the economy does not improve, the Fed will not be able to unload the low-quality assets on its balance sheet, and thus the inflationary pressures will remain. The so-called win-win solution to the crisis has become a lose-lose scenario.

This year in review for the Fed signals that the banking system might be moving to make use of its reserves. The shift out of deposits held at the Fed, and into currency, signals that banks are regaining a willingness to restart lending operations. These loans increase the money supply in the hands of the public, and will eventually cause price inflation.

David Howden
http://mises.org/daily/6368/The-Fed-in-2012

 

[kbate]

OMG! It's a Cut and Paste! It can't mean anything and therefore proves that the poster is a moron!

When I read a student's book report, I always give them an F if they reviewed a book they didn't write on their own. "I read, 'Dreams of My Father" by Barack Obama and my report is as. . . F!

Same goes for my mother's book club, I ridicule everyone who suggests we read a book instead of writing their own. What point is there in discussing someone else's book. Idiots.

After all, the words of others are without value, only original fresh thoughts have any validity.

 

[Ishmael]

The Socialist/Communist/Progressive/Statist/Liberal arguments are too flawed to be counted in any one persons lifetime. Oh, they sound good, and well meaning, but in order to sell this bill of goods the arguments have to be laid out in the very broadest of terms. Always in the context of, "We will give you this (whatever "this" might be) without any detail of how this 'this' will be accomplished or what 'this' is going to cost in terms of economic and real freedoms.

The nut of it is that they are going to prevent you from having to face the consequences of your own bad decisions. Of course what they never fully explain is that in order to accomplish this feat they must also prevent you from reaping the rewards of any good decisions that you might make. The fool believes, or hopes, that they will be able to reap rewards without having to suffer any consequences. This, of course, is a virtual impossibility. Overall the fact that you will suffer no consequences of bad decisions, AND will reap no great reward for good decisions implies, nay demands, that most decisions be removed from your ability to make at all.

Their 'utopia' demands that they become as ruthless in the administration of state control as the most avid of the radical Islamists. In defense of the avid Islamist, they at least have a document to guide them, even to the point of dictating which hand you should use to wipe your ass, but a document none the less. The Socialist has no such anchoring guidebook and thusly leans on their own 'feelings' of what is right and wrong, scientifically guided suffice it to say. Science that is guided by their own notion of what is 'right' and what is to be. Notions that have proven to be about as prescient as the reading of entrails. Public policy driven by the most recent copy of Popular Science.

Ishmael

 

[rosco rathbone]

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/nudge-ocracy

Perhaps the easiest place to see it is in the administration's fondness for behavioral economics, the branch of the dismal science that recognizes that humans aren't utility-maximizing automatons, but flawed creatures who often screw up simple calculations and struggle with self-control. The key behavioral insight is that the way we frame choices matters enormously. Take a classic behavioral example: pensions. In a fully rational world, everyone would enroll in their company's 401(k), which provides a financial incentive to save for retirement. In the real world, we frequently put off enrollment, not wanting to weigh all the confusing options or fill out tedious paperwork. If, on the other hand, our employer enrolled us automatically but allowed us to opt out, most would stick with it. Simply by changing the "default" option from out to in, we improve workers' welfare without limiting their freedom.

Thaler and Sunstein have dubbed this policymaking approach "libertarian paternalism," and it was highly influential within the campaign. (Sunstein, a longtime contributor to The New Republic, is now a top official in Obama's Office of Management and Budget.) For example, in addition to the retirement saving reform, which Obama later wrote into his budget, the campaign also warmed to a proposal called "intelligent assignment." The idea was a response to the fact that seniors enrolled in the Medicare prescription drug program are often overwhelmed by the dozens of plans they have to choose from, sometimes to the point of paralysis. The Obama wonks favored automatically enrolling many of them in the plan that best suited their needs, based on their drug-buying histories, then allowing them to switch if they found one they liked better.

 

[kbate]

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/nudge-ocracy[/][/QUOTE] "F" Write your own response.

 

[rosco rathbone]

"F"

Write your own response.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRwrg0db_zY

 

[kbate]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRwrg0db_zY

D+

You didn't write that song. Obama did.

 

[rosco rathbone]

D+

You didn't write that song. Obama did.

 

[richard_daily]

OMG! It's a Cut and Paste! It can't mean anything and therefore proves that the poster is a moron!

When I read a student's book report, I always give them an F if they reviewed a book they didn't write on their own. "I read, 'Dreams of My Father" by Barack Obama and my report is as. . . F!

Same goes for my mother's book club, I ridicule everyone who suggests we read a book instead of writing their own. What point is there in discussing someone else's book. Idiots.

After all, the words of others are without value, only original fresh thoughts have any validity.

There was a review included in AJ's C&P?

You apparently expect a lot more out a first grader than your buddy AJ. I wonder why you cut him so much more slack?

Maybe you've got a little crush?

 

[kbate]

There was a review included in AJ's C&P?

You apparently expect a lot more out a first grader than your buddy AJ. I wonder why you cut him so much more slack?

Maybe you've got a little crush?

Answer this.

When you last bought a book (first grade I'm guessing), did it include a review of itself by the author?

Did your teacher review the book when she assigned you to read and review it?

did you attack the teacher because you didn't like the book?

 

[JohnnySavage]

The republic has been on the verge of collapse, its women fleeing the rape squad and our riches plundered since it's formation - according to the doom and gloomers that have always existed.

May I recommend, American Aurora: A Democratic-Republican Returns; The Suppressed History of Our Nation's Beginnings and the Heroic Newspaper That Tried to Report It

Contemporary Americans longing for a return to civility in public life will be quite amazed when they read the press accounts of the early years of the Republic. Independent scholar Rosenfeld, in an innovative approach to the historical record, uses daily clips from Philadelphia newspapers to portray the early struggles over civil liberties. The Aurora, edited first by Benjamin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin, and then by William Duane, led the fight for greater freedoms. Competitor papers, The Porcupine's Gazette and Gazette of the United States, advocated greater government powers. The arguments between the different factions, including editors and politicians, were heated, vituperative, and sometimes physical. In addition to press accounts, letters from leading figures of the time and the Annals of Congress are quoted. Rosenfeld creates a fictional voice for editor Duane, who tells the story in the present tense and provides context for the original source material. A remarkable and innovative work of history that belongs in most libraries.?Judy Solberg, George Washington Univ., Washington D.C.

An excellent read that shows the more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Poor bitter AJ, still thinking "freedom of speech" only applies to him and his like-minded friends....and that "freedom of speech" implies freedom from criticism. "Ad Hominem By Class" and all that sorta stuff...

He's a victim! A VICTIM, DAMMIT!

 

[RobDownSouth]

Answer this.

When you last bought a book (first grade I'm guessing), did it include a review of itself by the author?

Did your teacher review the book when she assigned you to read and review it?

did you attack the teacher because you didn't like the book?

I guess you were absent the day they explained how gauche it was to answer a question with a question.

 

[Liar]

OMG! It's a Cut and Paste! It can't mean anything and therefore proves that the poster is a moron!

When I read a student's book report, I always give them an F if they reviewed a book they didn't write on their own.

If they just retype the book verbatum, offer no summary and no analysis, you should.

 

[Liar]

Anyway, is there someone on the "New Left" here who can confirm that this Robert L. Heilbroner whoever that is is one of their darlings?

 

[mercury14]

What the fuck happened to this?

The entire point of a "discussion board" is to put your own spin on it and tell us what you think. Any moron can google and come up with what someone else thinks.

Nobody cares what some wikipedia or google warrior thinks.

Were you bullshitting then or are you bullshitting now?

 

[richard_daily]

Answer this.

When you last bought a book (first grade I'm guessing), did it include a review of itself by the author?

Did your teacher review the book when she assigned you to read and review it?

did you attack the teacher because you didn't like the book?

So you're claiming that AJ was the author of the C&P that he posted?

Or is he the teacher?

Or maybe you're the teacher, and you just want to act out that van hallen video with him?

Please clarify, as you're currently all over the place.

 

[zipman]

What the fuck happened to this?



Were you bullshitting then or are you bullshitting now?

That's an excellent question.

 

[Adre]

What the fuck happened to this?



Were you bullshitting then or are you bullshitting now?

Oops.