Quando os agressores de fato lucram no mundo atual, isso ocorre “invariavelmente em locais onde matérias-primas são a única fonte real de riqueza”, através da extração de bens portáteis como diamante e marfim. Porém, a riqueza interconectada e intangível das finanças modernas não pode ser roubada dessa maneira. A invasão de Putin da Crimeia foi uma vitória militar fácil, mas que rapidamente se tornou um problema econômico, multiplicado pela exclusão da Rússia do suporte financeiro global.

Esse excelente resumo dos benefícios da cooperação econômica, explicando a divisão do trabalho e a heterogeneidade da riqueza, é bem vindo quando escrito pelo economista que disse em 14 de setembro de 2001 que “o ataque terrorista — como o dia da infâmia, que acabou com a Grande Depressão — poderia trazer alguns benefícios econômicos”, uma vez que “a destruição não é grande se comparada à economia, mas a reconstrução gerará pelo menos alguns aumentos de gastos empresariais”, e que afirmou na CNN que “se nós descobríssemos que alienígenas planejam um ataque e precisaríamos de um acúmulo enorme para contra-atacar a ameaça alien, colocando inflação e déficits orçamentários como considerações secundárias, esta recessão acabaria em 18 meses” (desde então, Krugman afirmou que estava fazendo uma “piada” no último caso, mas a versão do 11 de setembro não é tão engraçada).

Neoconservadores, como Krugman observa, elogiam abertamente os métodos de Putin, identificando-os como versões mais diretas dos seus (e ignorando seu keynesianismo militar). Esses paralelos são inevitáveis em economistas estatistas. Outras agências com iniciais diferentes podem ser mais leves que a KGB, mas “a violência e as ameaças de violência, suplementadas pelo suborno e pela corrupção” permanecem sua única fonte de riqueza. Outra coluna com a mesma tese (“Why We Fight“, 18 de agosto) observa: “É muito difícil extrair ovos de ouro de economias sofisticadas sem matar a galinha no processo”. Essas mudanças em direção à heterogeneidade e à descentralização, auxiliadas por possibilidades nascentes como as criptomoedas, dificuldam a extração de riqueza e a tornam mais difícil de taxar.

O estado keynesiano do século 20 foi construído sobre uma base econômica de uso massivo de matérias-primas, inclusive o petróleo que Krugman aponta como o motivo oculto da existência do ISIS. Ironicamente, ninguém foi mais presciente sobre a necessidade de transcender a economia baseada em combustíveis fósseis que um dos maiores representantes do movimento libertário — que frequentemente é visto como só uma fachada das grandes petroleiras — Karl Hess. No documentário vencedor do Oscar de 1980 Karl Hess: Toward Liberty, ele observou: “A energia solar tem implicações muito amplas. Ela está disponível em todo o mundo. É muito descentralizada. Se a energia puder ser coletada em qualquer parte da Terra, isso significa que mecanismos centrais não são necessários, que podemos produzir coisas importantes localmente”. Logo, “o Sol diz ‘liberdade'”. Da mesma forma que a economia livre que ele alimentaria.

Traduzido por Erick Vasconcelos.

When aggressors profit in today’s world, they “invariably do so in places where exploitable raw materials are the only real source of wealth,” fueled by looting of lucrative portable goods like diamonds and ivory. But the interconnected, intangible wealth of modern finance cannot be plundered that way. Putin’s invasion of Crimea was an easy win militarily, but promptly became an economic liability, compounded by the cutoff of Russia’s economy from global financial support.

This excellent summary of the benefits of economic cooperation, with division of labor and heterogeneity of wealth, is welcome from the economist who wrote on September 14, 2001 that “the terror attack — like the original day of infamy, which brought an end to the Great Depression — could even do some economic good” since “the destruction isn’t big compared with the economy, but rebuilding will generate at least some increase in business spending;” and stated on CNN that “if we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months.” (He has since said that he “joked” in the latter case, but the 9/11 version isn’t quite as funny.)

Neoconservatives, Krugman notes, unabashedly appreciate Putin’s methods as blunter versions of their own (while ignoring their military Keynesianism). Such parallels are inevitable in state economies. Other alphabet-soup agencies may be softer than the KGB, but its “violence and threats of violence, supplemented with bribery and corruption” remain their only source of wealth. Another column with the same thesis (“Why We Fight,” August 18) notes “it’s very hard to extract golden eggs from sophisticated economies without killing the goose in the process.” These shifts toward heterogeneity and decentralization, aided by such nascent possibilities as cryptocurrency, make it ever harder to loot wealth and also harder to tax it.

The twentieth-century Keynesian state was built on an industrial economic base tied to large-scale raw inputs, including the oil Krugman aptly points out as an unspoken rationale for ISIS. In a final irony, nobody was more prescient on the need to transcend the fossil-fuel economy than that stalwart of the libertarian movement which is often dismissed as a front for Big Oil, Karl Hess. In the 1980 Academy Award-winning documentary Karl Hess: Toward Liberty, he observed: “Solar energy has a very broad implication. It falls over the entire earth. It’s very decentralized. If energy can be picked up from any point on the Earth, it suggests to you that you don’t need central mechanisms; that you can produce important things at a local level.” Thus “the Sun says ‘freedom.’ ” And so does the liberated economy it would fuel.

Krugman believes that the president has “[changed] the country for the better,” despite bitter opposition from the GOP in Congress and people from the left, right and center on the outside.

Krugman believes that the supposedly positive incremental changes the president has made are better than nothing. “No president gets to do everything his supporters expected him to,” he writes.

Reading Krugman’s assessment of the Obama presidency, one must assume that the president’s hands are tied on some issues, that he sometimes necessarily stands by, helpless to do anything while the machinery of the state churns onward, unrelenting. But the policies the Obama administration has carried out have not passed under his nose unnoticed. He is not ignorant of some of the most egregious civil liberties violations his government has perpetrated. It is true that the president is merely one man, but he is a man who stands atop a structure that relies on violence and pain to continue its existence, and he took the position knowing full well that that was the case.

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There’s a powerful story in the book of 2 Samuel about the prophet Nathan confronting King David after he arranged the death of Uriah the Hittite and took his wife Bathsheba for himself. Nathan told David of a rich man, with enormous herds, who had a guest to feed. The man, to spare himself killing one of his own many livestock, instead stole and slaughtered the pet lamb of the poor man next door (which, the Bible says, he fed from his own plate and loved like a daughter). Upon hearing this David became outraged and swore “As the LORD liveth, the man who hath done this thing shall surely die.” And Nathan replied: “Thou art the man.”

Not only did the rule of Robber Barons in fact never end, but in denouncing them Krugman reveals himself as one of their foremost apologists.

Far from bringing Robber Baron rule to an end, the Progressive Era stabilized it in a web of government protections and subsidies. For example, the FTC’s treatment of below-cost dumping as a “unfair trade” practice, by outlawing price wars, made stable oligopoly markets possible for the first time.

Let me state up front that, while Amazon doesn’t actually qualify as a monopsonist (that is, a market actor with monopoly buying power that can unilaterally set terms for sellers) it is at least an oligopsonist (in this case the largest of a relatively small number of major buyers/distributors). As an anarchist who viscerally hates large corporations, and hates perhaps even more all kinds of proprietary, walled garden platforms, I’d much prefer to see an open-source or cooperatively owned platform taking over Amazon’s current role.

But that being said, if Krugman wants to fight Amazon, he’s picked a mighty peculiar hill to die on. Specifically, he objects to Amazon’s use of its market power as a buyer to force down the prices of traditional publishers like Hachette. But those prices are themselves enormously bloated to begin with, because of the monopoly premiums attendant on copyright. Amazon’s use of its purchasing power to shave off that monopoly premium is analogous to, say, Medicare D using its market power as a large-scale purchaser to negotiate down the price of prescription drugs under patent. (Of course we know Medicare doesn’t actually do this, or hardly does it, because of the drug companies’ lobbying power.)

Support for draconian “intellectual property” laws, like the WIPO Copyright Treaty, the Uruguay Round TRIPS accord, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the “intellectual property” components of all the so-called “Free Trade Agreements” proposed over the past decade or so, are strongly supported by both Republicans and Democrats. But the Democrats have an especially close relationship with proprietary content industries — the RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft are at the core of the Democratic coalition.

To repeat, the Robber Baron Era never ended. And far from being the Robber Barons’ enemy, the US government has been their chief tool for survival to this day. And perhaps the single most important function of the US government in upholding corporate power is enforcing “intellectual property,” so central to the business models of the proprietary content industries in the Democratic coalition. The most profitable industries in the global economy — entertainment, software, biotech, pharma, electronics — all depend on “intellectual property.” “Intellectual property” is central to the dominant industrial model by which Western corporations outsource all actual production to independent shops working on contract, but use patents or trademarks to retain monopoly rights over disposal of the product.

And perhaps more importantly “intellectual property” is at the heart of the business model of the new “green capitalism” or “progressive capitalism” personified by “patriotic billionaires” like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and their ilk. Their business model depends on using “intellectual property” to enclose new, green technologies as a source of monopoly rents, or — as in Buffett’s case — using heavily subsidized “smart grid” infrastructure to make his wind farms profitable.

The Robber Barons are with us just as much as ever, their power depends entirely on the capitalist state, and “progressives” like Paul Krugman — wittingly or unwittingly — are their shills.

The Nobel laureate economist surely understands that monopsony entails a sole buyer, not merely “a dominant buyer with the power to push prices down” in a particular market. Whatever its other faults, Amazon is no sole buyer, nor even part of an ogliopsony (a small cartel of buyers.)

Publishers can sell books through any number of retailers: Barnes & Noble. Apple. Google. Powell’s. Kobo. Countless independent eBook and print-on-demand shops. Authors can even publish on their own websites, selling directly to readers. Amazon is an immensely popular and lucrative option for authors and publishers, but by no means the ONLY option.

Krugman’s pretext contra Amazon is its current feud with major publisher Hachette, which denied Amazon an increased cut of the action on its titles. He senses an ominous power play in Amazon’s retaliation by “delaying their delivery, raising their prices, and/or steering customers to other publishers”.

It ain’t pretty, but brick and mortar businesses do the equivalent every day: Shelving the most profitable items at eye level while less lucrative items get bottom-shelf space if they get any at all.

“It’s not just about the money,” writes Krugman, always a sign that it is just about the money. Although Hachette is not Krugman’s publisher, if it surrenders in the price war, other big boys like Krugman’s publisher, W.W. Norton, won’t bother to fight. So yes, Krugman’s own bottom line is at stake.

But Krugman’s ultimate reason for picking Hachette’s dog in the fight between two sectors of big business — and his real beef with Amazon — seems to be, of all things, that Amazon reduces the very income inequality Krugman famously specializes in condemning.

Amazon’s existence lowers book prices for readers in multifarious ways, from selection competition to electronic editions to its online marketplace for used copies. Yet Amazon has simultaneously diminished the cost for anyone to publish and sell books and earn money. By offering an alternative to the genuine near-monopoly of capital-intensive big publishers, Amazon distributes those lower prices and that new revenue more evenly among readers and authors.

Hachette and Krugman know they can’t turn back the clock that produced Amazon’s burgeoning marketplaces, preferring to benefit from them, but are convinced Amazon owes them a walled garden, sparing them price competition with the rabble. They want Amazon to preserve their income inequality at the expense of its customers.

Contra Krugman’s beloved historical myth that “the robber baron era ended when we as a nation decided that some business tactics were out of line,” any potential robber-baron power Amazon wields depends on the very same uniform, artificially large-scale federal transportation and postal shipping infrastructure that locked in the profits of the Gilded Age business cartels. Dismantling those subsidies, not propping up publishing’s Hachettes, would be the real way to keep Amazon honest.

“Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history,” Krugman writes. His evidence? Health reform doesn’t suck nearly as much as it might, economic reform didn’t cripple nearly as many big cities as predicted, and most bafflingly, the Obama administration’s environmental policy is, in Krugman’s opinion, doing just fine and dandy, thank you very much.

Never mind that Detroit lies in ruins; that healthcare reform provides a larger conduit for profits and unfair advantages for health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies than at any point under the previous “free market” system; that one of Obama’s main environmental goals is construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, intentionally holding the ecosystem of the entire Midwestern United States hostage so that TransCanada can make money on the dirtiest form of fossil fuel known to humanity.

This is to say nothing of the Obama administration’s deleterious foreign policy; a domestic surveillance program that disregards every privacy law up to and including the constitutional ban on unwarranted search and seizure; a military-to-police equipment pipeline that gives local law enforcement the illusion of greater power and impunity to do worse and worse things to individuals.

Let’s not forget that it’s the Obama administration’s Justice Department that spied on the Associated Press. It’s the Obama administration that killed Anwar and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki with drones. Chelsea Manning languishes in prison for leaking information to Wikileaks under the Obama administration’s watch.

Krugman believes that the president has “[changed] the country for the better,” despite bitter opposition from the GOP in Congress and people from the left, right and center on the outside.

Krugman believes that the supposedly positive incremental changes the president has made are better than nothing. “No president gets to do everything his supporters expected him to,” he writes.

Reading Krugman’s assessment of the Obama presidency, one must assume that the president’s hands are tied on some issues, that he sometimes necessarily stands by, helpless to do anything while the machinery of the state churns onward, unrelenting. But the policies the Obama administration has carried out have not passed under his nose unnoticed. He is not ignorant of some of the most egregious civil liberties violations his government has perpetrated. It is true that the president is merely one man, but he is a man who stands atop a structure that relies on violence and pain to continue its existence, and he took the position knowing full well that that was the case.

The incremental, superficial change that Krugman lauds is just new window dressing on a house awaiting demolition. To be clear: There is nothing good about the Obama presidency; or any presidency, for that matter. It is the office itself that poisons what might have otherwise been decent people.

Paul Krugman, provavelmente inconscientemente, se movimenta de forma interessante sempre que articula sua visão sobre o que guia as ações dos agentes do governo em oposição a atores do mercado. Quando ele fala sobre estes últimos, ele presume, talvez corretamente, que sejam motivados puramente pelo interesse pessoal, pela ganância e pelos benefícios particulares que podem ser conseguidos, a despeito de quem seja prejudicado, com a poluição de recursos naturais ou com a venda de produtos perigosos aos consumidores, por exemplo. Tudo bem, mas ao considerarmos as motivações dos burocratas do governo, deveríamos ter as mesmas premissas, certo? Não exatamente. Veja bem, de acordo com a visão de mundo de Krugman, simplesmente não há motivos para pensar que os pensadores da escolha pública realmente tenham feito contribuições significativas ao nosso entendimento das maquinações políticas, que devamos olhar para a política “sem romance” e considerar as motivações dos poderosos no governo da mesma forma que as consideramos nas empresas. Não importa o trabalho de gente como Butler Shaffer, que mostrou que as grandes empresas há muito tempo fazem campanhas em favor das regulamentações para “obter benefícios que não eram capazes de conseguir por conta própria”. Para uma empresa ou para qualquer outro ator dentro do mercado, a falta de flexibilidade e capacidade de resposta às mudanças significa entropia.

Shaffer demonstrou que empresas estabelecidas e bem conectadas que não desejem sofrer mudanças, é mais fácil tentar mudar o ambiente da competição, transferindo sua entropia para os concorrentes. Os meios legais e regulatórios se apresentam. No mundo de Krugman, porém, em que o estado benfeitor nos foi dado pela Graça Divina, é inconcebível que os reguladores possam ter intenções diversas do mais puro altruísmo. Em sua cabeça, uma vez que já estamos próximos a um mercado desregulado atualmente, precisamos de mais intervenções benevolentes advindas dos burocratas do governo em Brasília, que são superiores moralmente a nós. Krugman é incapaz de ver que seu cabresto ideológico esconde o fato de que já vivemos sob um estado corporativo centrista (ou seja, fascista) e que esse estado foi incapaz de agir da forma que ele deseja.

Krugman, portanto, é o fantasista utópico com quem ele próprio tanto se preocupa. Sua fé na benevolência do poder centralizado é tão grande que supera todas as suas crenças sobre as tendências do interesse particular sem freios. Os Krugmans do mundo ainda não aprenderam que os burocratas do governo pensam da mesma forma que os agentes do setor privado, os gerentes corporativos que são os vilões na narrativa social-democrata. Grandes instituições burocráticas, tanto “públicas” quanto “privadas”, com ou sem fins lucrativos, inculcam uma ortodoxia essencialmente hierárquica, uma deferência às decisões centralizadas e ao julgamento superior dos especialistas. No livro Bureaucracy, de 1859, Richard Simpson explicava a mentalidade burocrática:

“[A] ideia de burocracia não está completa até que acrescentemos uma presunção pedante de capacidade de dirigir nossas vidas, saber o que é melhor para nós, mensurar nosso trabalho, supervisionar nossos estudos, prescrever nossas opiniões, responsabilizar-se por nós, nos colocar na cama, cobrir, colocar um gorro em nossa cabeça e nos alimentar com uma papinha. Esse elemento não parece ser possível sem a ideia por parte do poder governante de que ele possui o segredo da vida, o conhecimento real de toda a ciência política, que deve dirigir a conduta de todos os homens ou ao menos de todos os cidadãos. Assim, qualquer governo que estabeleça como seu objetivo o bem maior da humanidade, o defina e dirija todos os seus esforços para alcançá-lo tende a se tornar uma burocracia.”

Nossos governantes dependem de apologistas como Paul Krugman, os intelectuais públicos que realmente acreditam neles e que são sinceramente incapazes de entender a natureza criminosa da autoridade política. Como descentralistas e libertários, não devemos esperar convencê-los. Mas podemos demonstrar que as fantasias não são dos libertários, cujas ideias nunca tiveram espaço. Com todas as suas advertências perturbadas sobre os libertários, são as ideias de autoritários como Krugman e David Brooks que repercutem nos EUA há muito tempo, defendendo uma burocracia que domina todas as áreas da vida. Individualistas de esquerda e descentralistas entendem que não há pessoa ou organização que possua o “segredo da vida”. Assim, devemos resistir à tentação de dar o poder arbitrário e coercitivo ao estado, que, por natureza, não pode jamais ser altruísta ou ter preocupações genuínas com o povo.

Traduzido por Erick Vasconcelos.

Paul Krugman, unconsciously I’m sure, makes an interesting move whenever he articulates his view of what it is that drives the acts of government agents as opposed to market actors. When he’s talking about the latter group, he assumes, perhaps quite rightly, that they are motivated by unalloyed self-interest, by greed and the bottom line, regardless of who gets trampled on, whether it means polluting cherished, shared natural resources or hawking unsafe products to consumers. Well, all right, so when we’re considering the motivations of DC bureaucrats, the same assumptions ought to hold, right? Not exactly. You see, in the Krugman worldview, there is just no reason to fear that the public choice scholars actually made a meaningful contribution to our understanding of political machinations, that we should look at politics “without romance” and consider the motivations of the powerful in government just as we do the powerful in business. Never mind the work of people like Butler Shaffer, who has shown that big business has long agitated for regulation as a way “to obtain benefits it has been unable to secure by its own efforts.” For a firm or any other market actor, lack of flexibility and responsiveness to changing conditions means entropy.

Shaffer demonstrates that for entrenched and well-connected firms that don’t want to change themselves, it is often easier to attempt to change their competitive environs, to pass their entropy onto their competitors. Legal and regulatory means present themselves. In Krugman world, however, a world in which the cherubic state was given to us from heaven by Immaculate Conception, it is inconceivable that regulators could be anything but pure of heart in their altruism. In his mind, since we already have close to an unfettered free market today, what we need is more benevolent intervention from our moral betters in DC. For Krugman, ideological blinders occlude the fact that we already have his progressive, centrist corporate-statism (i.e., fascism), and that it has utterly failed to do anything remotely like what he wants it to do.

Krugman, then, is the utopian fantasist that he’s so worried about, his faith in the benevolence of centralized power overriding everything he claims he believes about the tendencies of unchecked self-interest. The Krugmans of the world haven’t learned that government bureaucrats are actually committed to a way of thinking almost identical to that of their private sector counterparts, the corporate middle managers who are the villains in a mainstream liberal’s morality play. Large bureaucratic institutions, whether “public” or “private,” whether for profit or not, inculcate an essentially hierarchical orthodoxy, a deference to centralized decision making and to the supernal judgment of experts. In his 1859 work Bureaucracy, Richard Simpson explained the bureaucratic mind:

[T]he idea of a bureaucracy is not fulfilled till we add the pedantic element of a pretence to direct our life, to know what is best for us, to measure out our labour, to superintend our studies, to prescribe our opinions, to make itself answerable for us, to put us to bed, tuck us up, put on our nightcap, and administer our gruel. This element does not seem possible without a persuasion on the part of the governing power that it is in possession of the secret of life, that it has a true knowledge of the all-embracing political science, which should direct the conduct of all men, or at least of all citizens. Hence any government that avowedly sets before its eyes the summum bonum of humanity, defines it, and directs all its efforts to this end, tends to become a bureaucracy.

Our overlords rely on the earnest apologetics of people like Paul Krugman, the public intellectuals who really mean it, and quite sincerely won’t ever understand the criminal nature of political authority. As decentralists and libertarians, we cannot expect to convince them. But we can demonstrate that the fantasies aren’t coming from libertarians, the ideas of whom haven’t ever actually been given a chance. For all his perturbed warnings about libertarians, it is the ideas of authoritarians like Krugman and David Brooks that have been winning the day in the U.S. for a long time, with bureaucracy engulfing every area of life. Left wing individualists and decentralists understand that no person or organization can possess “the secret of life.” We therefore resist granting arbitrary, coercive power to the State, which by nature can never be genuinely public-spirited or altruistic.

Getting into his economic-wonk comfort zone as quickly as possible, Krugman perfunctorily brushes past the entire actual topic of the magazine article, the appeal of libertarianism to today’s youth, with this: “Polling suggests that young Americans tend, if anything, to be more supportive of the case for a bigger government than their elders.” (Which kind of depends on how you interpret the polls.) But then, keeping up with cultural zeitgeist is not exactly the strong suit of Mr. Twinkie Manifesto who, between his declaration that “The political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost” (rightly pegged by actual leftist Arun Gupta as “mush-brained“), what Brink Lindsey dubs his nostalgianomics, his lamenting “the breakdown of marriage“, and his reliance on hoary references to Atlas Shrugged (“basically Dwight Eisenhower’s America”) as a proxy for libertarian attitudes, hasn’t gotten past the 1950s. A generation whose view of government is the rot of Game of Thrones rather than the G-Men of The F.B.I., and whose notion of heroic business owes more to the Hunger Games series’s black-market bazaar, The Hob, than to captains of industry, does not compute in that Pleasantville worldview. (The Times‘s Dave Kehr is more perceptive: whereas the H.G. Wells film Things to Come‘s portrayal of a decentralized period before the ascendance of a purportedly-beneficent world government was “a vision of hell to a progressive like Wells”, now “it looks like a land of opportunity, free from corporate oppression and technological tyranny. With her trusty bow and arrow, Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen would feel right at home”.)

Krugman waves a single word at libertarian economics like a vampire hunter’s crucifix: “phosphorous”.  (Not “phlogiston“?) The chemical’s contamination of Lake Erie is treated as a prime example of a problem which self-evidently can be fixed only by the regulatory apparatus of a benevolent government. Did somebody say water pollution? Charles Johnson elucidates that

statist anti-pollution laws are stopping small, local environmental groups from actually taking direct, simple steps toward containing the lethal pollution that is constantly running into their communities’ rivers — and … big national environmental groups are lobbying hard to make sure that the smaller, grassroots environmental groups keep getting blocked by the Feds.

No mention is made of the decades of substantial libertarian literature dealing with pollution, much of it specifically about water pollution. Murray Rothbard treated the pollution problem in a detailed section in his 1973 For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto and a lengthy 1982 article for the Cato Institute [PDF]. How far Rothbard’s take is from the visceral denialist, pro-existing-industry view of conservatives like, well, Paul Ryan (Krugman’s Exhibit A of libertarian “projection”), can be gleaned from his noting that “denial of the very existence of the [pollution] problem is to deny science itself”, that

if governments as owners of the rivers permit pollution of water, then industrial technology will — and has — become a water-polluting technology. If production processes are allowed to pollute the rivers unchecked by their owners, then that is the sort of production technology we will have.

and, most of all, that

The argument that such an injunctive prohibition against pollution would add to the costs of industrial production is as reprehensible as the pre-Civil War argument that the abolition of slavery would add to the costs of growing cotton.

Even the most cursory glance over the 1971 New York Times Magazine article “The New Right Credo — Libertarianism”, which is directly mentioned in the new NYTM piece, would reveal its lengthy section on the ill effects of pollution, which is mentioned no less than 17 times. (Not to mention that it’s also harshly critical of car culture.  But then again, what is more exemplary of the postwar Keynesian economy than the auto industry, with its triopoly stability and propped-up consumer demand?)

Krugman’s entire rejoinder to Milton Friedman’s proposal that tort law could effectively replace the regulatory state as a check on corporate power (only one of enough such examples to fill a book) — and his only actual attempt at addressing free-market proposals at all — is: “Really?” Really. Never mind that exactly that approach has been championed by no less of a foe of corporate power than Ralph Nader, much to the chagrin of more statist leftists like Doug Henwood, who chides Nader that tort “[l]itigation is an individualized solution to broad economic and social conflicts whose proper arena is politics, not the courtroom.” And while Krugman feebly notes the correlation that “people who denounce big government also tend to call for tort reform and attack trial lawyers”, Nader has never passed up an opportunity to note how “tort reform” and limitations on legal liability fly in the face of any consistent adherence to free-market principles.

Krugman sees the idea that “welfare programs are wasting vast sums on bureaucracy rather than helping the poor” to be as fictional as Ayn Rand’s novels. (At least he’s giving libertarians the credit of thinking that “helping the poor” is a good thing. And why not replace what little bureaucracy exists with direct payments to the poor?) Never mind the cutting criticism of the welfare state’s supposed beneficence from the real left’s Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, as summarized by the New York Times itself:

Historically, they argue, public relief has served to regulate the poor, not assist them; to defuse political turmoil and discipline the labor force. From the Middle Ages, governments have extended relief whenever mass unemployment caused by economic dislocation begins to threaten political order. Once such flashpoints are passed, the relief rolls are constricted; whatever residual assistance remains is administered in such a harsh and degrading fashion as to stand warning for the laboring poor.

As an example of how out of touch libertarians are, Krugman notes that his experiences with the D.M.V. “have generally been fairly good… and I’m sure many libertarians would, if they were honest, admit that their own D.M.V. dealings weren’t too bad”. Few would say the same about the D.E.A.

Wrapping up his purported case that libertarian economics and antigovernment sentiment “is a foolish fantasy”, Krugman concludes that the American left-right spectrum will be undisturbed by libertarianism: “despite America’s growing social liberalism, real power on the right still rests with the traditional alliance between plutocrats and preachers.” But with the memory of the mid-20th-century Cold and culture wars fading, it is increasingly likely that such a Reaganite alliance will not define the future. Let the plutocrats and theocrats huddle together with the bureaucrats. Free-market entrepreneurs and sincere religious believers will no longer be their captive constituency, leaving their increasingly hollow power behind to join with their true worker and free-to-be comrades in a live-and-let-live, pluralistic, post-Twinkie world.

Como alguém que mais defende Paul Krugman do que não, sei que me contraponho à corrente libertária majoritária. Dadas, porém, as realidades da forma de capitalismo de estado sob a qual vivemos — sistema essencialmente corporatista cujas semelhanças com o “livre mercado” são em sua maioria coincidências — descubro que os keynesianos estão certos quanto à análise das causas da Grande Recessão.

Aqueles da Direita que acham que o problema é aos ricos faltar dinheiro para “investir em empregos” estão vivendo num mundo de sonhos. Não, os ricos investiram dinheiro em esquemas Ponzi tais como a bolha imobiliária precisamente porque tinham mais capital nas mãos do que conseguiam encontrar meios produtivos de investir. A economia já andava afligida por excesso de capacidade industrial que mal conseguia ser utilizada, mesmo com o nível da demanda acelerado por dívidas assentadas em patrimônio líquido inflado pela bolha. Os ricos já têm mais dinheiro do que desejam investir, porque nenhuma pessoa sã contrataria pessoas para produzirem mais coisas num ambiente de menos pessoas empregadas comprando coisas — e de poder de compra dos empregados não mais inflado por empréstimos hipotecários da Ditech.

Em termos simples, não é o nível de investimento o problema — e sim o nível de demanda.

Portanto os keynesianos estão corretos quanto à causa próxima do problema — a análise deles aplica-se muito melhor à economia corporatista na qual vivemos, se não a um mercado genuinamente emancipado, do que a da Direita libertária. A principal falha deles é a incapacidade de avançar para além das causas próximas e ir à raiz do problema.

Bom exemplo é a coluna de Krugman no New York Times, “O Hiato da Produção”(19 de janeiro).  Ele aponta para um hiato estimado entre o PIB real e potencial, resultante de insuficiência na demanda agregada, de $903 biliões de dólares no próximo ano. Até aqui, tudo bem.

O que ele deixa de observar é que nem tudo que acrescenta um dólar ao PIB é bom. Muito do PIB equivale, na linguagem de Frederic Bastiat, ao custo de substituir vitrines quebradas. Muito do PIB, em seu ápice, resultou de desperdício subsidiado e obsolescência planejada. Portanto, com todo o devido respeito por Krugman, a maior parte da falta de produção que ele identifica é porcaria de má qualidade projetada para cair aos pedaços afim de manter a capacidade industrial plenamente utilizada, e a demanda respectiva foi alimentada inteiramente por pessoas endividando-se para continuar a comprar tal porcaria de má qualidade.

Não há como contornar o fato de que, visto ser nossa economia atualmente estruturada nos moldes do capitalismo de estado, grande parte das pessoas está empregada fabricando coisas inúteis. E simplesmente não há como impedir drástico decréscimo das cifras de PIB nominal e de emprego a não ser por meio do subsídio de comportamento patológico para manter as pessoas consumindo.

Krugman está inteiramente correto em argumentar que, do modo como a economia está atualmente estruturada, o único modo de obter-se pleno emprego é o governo gastar para compensar a queda da demanda. Não há porém cenário plausível no qual a economia, uma vez dado o pontapé inicial de acionamento da bomba keynesiana (desculpem-me a metáfora mista), continue a funcionar de modo autossustentável sem a continuação dos gastos do governo. Não há cenário plausível no qual a economia sequer atinja os níveis de demanda, ou de produção nominal, que existiam há três anos.

A “administração da demanda agregada” keynesiana funcionará este ano, se o governo incorrer num déficit de $1 trilião de dólares. Se, porém, o orçamento for equilibrado no ano que vem, a economia voltará à depressão. Assim, o antigo modelo keynesiano, no qual o governo incorre em déficit nos tempos difíceis e tem tal déficit pago ao gozar de excedente nos tempos bons está tão extinto quanto o pombo-passageiro. Não há tempos bons, do modo como hoje estruturado o capitalismo de estado, sem déficit perpétuo.

Portanto incluam-me entre os “deflacionistas” dos quais Krugman usualmente zomba. A realidade substantiva com que nos defrontamos é que são precisos menos investimento em capital físico, e menos horas de trabalho, para produzir o que a maioria das pessoas considera padrão de vida confortável.

A agenda tanto de Bush quanto de Obama foi a de sustentar os valores de ativos inflados por rendas, como fonte de demanda agregada, e inflar os dólares de investimento e horas de trabalho necessários para produzir dada unidade de valor-uso. A única saída, porém, no longo prazo, é exatamente o oposto: Eliminar a porção do preço de bens e serviços que resulta de rendas decorrentes de escassez artificial, de tal modo que a pessoa média possa viver confortavelmente com semana de trabalho mais curta.

No curto prazo, o keynesianismo é a única maneira de impedir o colapso do capitalismo de estado. No longo prazo, porém, o capitalismo de estado é insustentável. A única saída é ir além do capitalismo de estado.

No final, teremos de encontrar algum meio de sair da roda do hamster.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 21 de janeiro de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.