Koch-Funded Economist Wants “Less Democracy”
Weekend Edition March 27-29, 2015
Professor of Capitalism
Koch-Funded Economist Wants “Less Democracy”
by BEN NORTON
Dr. Garett Jones is wary of democracy. He is Associate Professor of Economics and BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center, “the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas,” at George Mason University, you see. He wants “less democracy.” He, like so many of his academic colleagues, writes scholarly articles in prestigious economics journals, extolling the virtues of moralless, unmitigated greed and absolute plutocratic tyranny. And it just so happens that that inconvenient “democracy” thing is an “inefficient” burden on the path toward a society based on these principles.
In “10% Less Democracy: How Less Voting Could Mean Better Governance,” a 24 February 2015 presentation at George Mason University’s Center for Study of Public Choice, Jones bemoans the “anti-market bias” inherent in democracy. He laments that protectionism is “encouraged by voters,” and that, “around the world, looming elections mean less labor market liberalization.” Jones also is distraught that elected electricity commissioners “shift costs to the … industrial sector.” The burden should always be on the worker, naturally.
A good macroeconomist maintains “skepticism toward maximum democracy,” the professor says, as “less democratic monetary policy” leads to “lower, more stable inflation, with no apparent change in the unemployment rate or real GDP growth.” He cites Alan Blinder, a former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Princeton professor of economics who served on President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, who candidly admits that “events since 1997 have pushed me more and more toward the conclusion that society would indeed be better off if politicians confined themselves to broad decisions about tax policy and left the details to a group of technocrats analogous to the Fed’s Board of Governors.” This is the kind of thing economists say to each other behind closed doors: Democracy is bad, and society would be much better if ruled under the silicon fist of a technocratic oligarchy.
Prof. Jones also draws from the work of Jennifer Hochschild, a professor of government and African and African-American studies at Harvard University, who argues that “expansions of the suffrage bring in, on average, people who are less politically informed or less broadly educated than those already eligible to vote.” Those who take this view to its “logical” conclusion are compelled, by this “logic,” to deduce that more democracy is bad. (Uncoincidentally, this is the very same argument chauvinists and white supremacists used to oppose voting rights for women and black Americans, paving the way for rigged literacy tests.)
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/27/koch-funded-economist-wants-less-democracy/
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