2016 Postmortem

portlander23

(2,078 posts) Wed Oct 7, 2015, 07:44 PM Oct 2015

Rolling Stone: Robert Reich on Why Capitalism Needs Saving

Your book is focused on the idea that the term "free market" is a false distraction, and a harmful one at that. Why is that?

This idea forces us to make a choice that is not the central choice at all. Our system is a market with rules that are set by administrations, agencies, legislators and judges and then continuously set and reset almost every day in thousands of ways. The real issue we need to keep our eye on is who benefits from these rules, and who is having the most influence in making them. The classical, interminable debate we've got ourselves into between government and the so-called free market is a distraction from this more fundamental question that we ought to be raising and that I'm trying to raise in this book.

You served in the Clinton White House, and it's interesting to see that legacy being debated right now, especially with Hillary as the frontrunner. Bill Clinton has recently made statements on how he did a lot of things wrong on financial reform and mass incarceration. On the other hand, a lot of people point to those years as a time when wages really went up, and there was a strong economy. What has surprised you the most about the way the historical memory of the Clinton years is being brought up now?

... But in the end, his administration was what we might have considered to be, in a slightly different era, a liberal Republican administration. The structure of the economy didn't change all that much. The underlying trends toward widening inequality were still there. And Bill Clinton's getting rid of welfare altogether, or substituting a five-year maximum on welfare, proved to be very cruel to many Americans who in their lifetimes will need more than five years. In fact, we had a deep recession that caused many people to lose everything, and there wasn't a safety net for them. And his deregulation of Wall Street was clearly wrongheaded. Not only repealing the Glass-Steagall act, but failing to regulate derivatives when Brooksley Born and others at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission wanted to do so in the late Nineties.

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