Economy in a Democracy
Throughout the human history there were always ups and downs of economy. Barring natural calamities, one wonders what can cause an economy to go down, when most of the people consume and are materialistic! Are humans that foolish collectively so as not to see what is going wrong? Why do many people look to short cuts for gains at the expense of others? All these are philosophical questions. 🙂 But there are some who can see what is wrong and can try to bring it to light. Watch this video about a book “The Gardens of Democracy” by Eric Liu & Nick Hanauer. The things that make common sense in present day democracies are told in a very lucid way and one wonders why is it so difficult to get, for some people?!
When the Republican party is so much obsessed with ‘promoting small government’ and Democratic party appears (in my view they try to tend to their base this way) to be obsessed with having ‘as big a government as possible’, it is refreshing to see a perspective in this from the authors who say the Government has to be really about “Big on What and Small on How”. This means the government should really pave the way for many ambitious projects which the private sector balks at even considering and then should make sure that is done in the smallest expense possible, this can be even by privatizing it in pieces that are needed. I think where democrats and republicans fail is in pulling this to the extremes.
The other thing that I kind of always felt how dimwits anyone can be to not see how the economy needs to be rejuvenated is, how reducing the taxes on top 1% or let us say top 5% earners will not create lot of jobs! Do they really know what they are talking about? Let us say someone earns a million dollars and the current tax they pay is say 25%. By reducing it to 20% that person saves $50000. How many decent jobs, he or she can create? one or two? That too if they create! Some may say, oh they may spend the money so the economy can thrive! So how many pairs of clothes or shoes or ipads can one person consume?! That too if they spend! And what do they do with rest of the money? To evade taxes they may not even declare and stash in different ways including putting them in Swiss banks! On the other hand if the money is given to 10 people who are earning $100000, they would buy 10 pairs of cloths, shoes and ipads. It is a simple math, which the right wingers are trying to not acknowledge and hence hood-wink lot of people. Anyway all this is well said in the video and put in a very scientific way. A must watch.
By the way, later part of the interview is with Irshad Manji, a reformist islamist which is a riveting one too but that is another subject!
For some reason if the video is not embedding
Full video here. watch from around 18 minutes or so.