In one of the great scenes of one of the great gangster movies, Mike Newell’s “Donnie Brasco,” an aging Mafioso named Lefty Ruggiero paces a hospital corridor while his son fights for his life following a drug overdose.
“Twenty-eight years, you can read it on his birth certificate: Bellevue Hospital,” Lefty, played by Al Pacino, tells Donnie, played by Johnny Depp, about his comatose son. “Now he’s back, in there, and I’m out here, worried to my death. And he’s asleep in there, same as 28 years ago, with the same expression. He’s made no progress.”
It’s a line that could apply just as well to America’s policy debates.
Twenty-eight years ago — that was 1997, when “Donnie Brasco” came out — we thought we had made progress, at least when it came to answering some of the larger questions that had roiled 20th-century politics.
Trade protectionism? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and beggar-thy-neighbor policies of the 1930s showed us the worldwide economic ruin to which that could lead. Government stakes in private enterprise, like the Trump administration’s recent equity stake in Intel? The record of state investment in, or control of, private enterprises, from Solyndra to Sematech (not to mention Alitalia or “Such a Bad Experience Never Again” Sabena), is mostly a story of financial disappointment, taxpayer bailouts, managerial incompetence, political interference and cronyism.
America First? The slogan of Charles Lindbergh and other pre-World War II isolationists should have been buried forever on Dec. 7, 1941. Instead, it emerged from its grave some 75 years later.
But it isn’t just the Trump administration that is reawakening the moral and intellectual zombies of the past. Everywhere one looks there are policy necromancers.
The platform of the national Democratic Socialists of America calls for a 32-hour workweek “with no reduction in pay or benefits”; “free public universal child care and pre-K”; “college for all”; the cancellation of “all student-loan debt”; “universal rent control”; “massive public investment to transition away from fossil fuels”; “guaranteed support for workers in the fossil fuel industry,” and “expansive paid family leave.” Not only would American workers stand to benefit, but so would everybody else, since the D.S.A. wants to offer these benefits to anyone who wishes to come to United States through an open-borders policy.
How would the D.S.A. pay for all this? By soaking the rich, along with “for-profit corporations, large inheritances, and private colleges and universities.” Why did nobody think of this before?
Oh, wait — many did. “Bolivarian socialism,” welcomed by the Jeremy Corbyns of the world, took Venezuela from being South America’s richest country to a humanitarian catastrophe. Sweden attempted a form of socialism in the 1970s and ’80s, only to reverse course after it experienced massive capital flight and a financial crisis during which interest rates hit 75 percent. France’s Socialist government imposed a 75 percent tax on earnings over one million euros in 2012; it dropped the tax two years later as the wealthy packed their bags. Britain’s National Health Service, whose advocates chronically complain is “underfunded,” is in a state of perpetual crisis even as health care, according to the BBC, gobbles up roughly one third of government spending.
“The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money,” Margaret Thatcher once observed. To put it another way, you can’t abolish billionaires, as Zohran Mamdani, the D.S.A.’s poster child, would like, and still expect them to keep footing your bills.
Read the rest here.
2 comments:
Democratic socialism is certainly no panacea, but it's a "dumb idea" that's been the norm in Western Europe and Canada for over a generation. None of those countries are paradises. All share our continual political turmoil. But my sister has lived in England for some thirty years, and my daughter in France for five, and both have prospered in places they find more humane and supportive of families than anywhere in the US.
Just a personal example. My parents, who themselves never got past high school, paid for the education of all three of their children (including a doctorate in history from Oxford for my sister). I have always been committed to doing the same for my kids, and I am fortunate that I can make the manageable monthly student loan payments from my kids' colleges (and may even live long enough to pay them off). So I was a little alarmed when my daughter announced that she wanted to try for a Master's from the University of Paris, at least until I learned that the tuition was less than $400.00 per year. In fact she got two Master's, over three years, paid the tuition out of pocket, and was able to support herself as an au pair for some families with young children and as a private English tutor (obviously one of those "lazy Millennials" we hear so much about). So I'm a little shocked when I hear very the idea of free college tuition as "dumb.".
The same story could be told of European health care, labor conditions, maternal care. They are by no means perfect, but honestly they often put the US to shame.
We live a wealthy country, but it's still too much run on the principle of every man for himself and devil take the hindmost. I have to admit I have been shocked this last month to learn how many Americans depend on SNAP benefits for basic nutrition. And please don't get me started on literacy.
And I don't think it really comes down to making a stark choice between capitalism and socialism. It's a matter of where socialism is practical, where capitalism produces the wealth that justifies its competitive ferocity, the old old question of production and distribution. We can go broke with a poorly run socialism. We can consign the masses to a living hell with a thorough-going capitalism. But there are successful socialist economies, and I'd like to think that the US tries to engage in a fair and charitable capitalism. It's not certain that we could manage or would be happier with the European model; but it's certainly not dumb to consider it.
Rick, an excellent reflection. I especially agree with your hope "that the US tries to engage in a fair and charitable capitalism." I find the thinking behind the "Big, Beautiful Bill" closely followed by tariffing to be way too brutal for the poor.
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