The Boston Globe writes a glowing editorial on statist economist John Kenneth Galbraith:
His verdict in ''The Affluent Society" in 1958, that life in the consumption-driven United States is marked by ''private opulence and public squalor," is as true now as ever.
Since,state,local and federal spending is bigger than ever since government workers can vote: you've got to wonder who writes editorials at the Globe sometimes.Here's a more honest view of the usually wrong John Kenneth Galbraith by
Fred Siegel in the DLC magazine Blueprints of all places:
When Galbraith commented on New York's 1970s fiscal crisis, brought on in large measure by the massive growth of welfare spending, his solution was to spend even more. Stung by the rise of the monetarist school of conservative economics led by Milton Friedman, Galbraith's alternative in the 1970s was to call for the nationalization of major American industries.
This was a natural extension of the arguments he had laid out in The New Industrial State (1967). There, he argued that large corporations, through their ability to stifle competition and supposedly guarantee consumption through advertising, were a private-sector version of a planned economy immune to competitive forces. But Galbraith's attempt to update FDR's fight against "the economic royalists" fell flat in the 1970s, when American auto, steel, and airline companies were knocked off their thrones by foreign competition.
Extending the argument of The New Industrial State, Galbraith insisted that the United States and the Soviet Union were becoming increasingly alike, converging into somewhat different versions of the planned society. This was no small misjudgment. Galbraith's conceit about the depth of his insights led him 1980 to describe the gray-on-gray world of East Berlin as strikingly similar to the neon-lit streets of West Berlin.
Five years later, writing for The New Yorker about another visit to the Eastern bloc, he argued, "The Soviet system has made great material progress in recent years. ... One sees it in the appearance of solid well-being of the people on the streets. ... Partly the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower."
Comrade Galbraith never grasped how a company like Wal-Mart could go public in the 1970's and become the nation's largest retailer.Reality never fit his deeply help socialist values.How ironic though,John Kenneth Galbraith's Massachusetts is the only state in America to lose population two years in a row.Galbraith values mean decline.
