Failure of Free-market Capitalism
None of this throws Hobsbawm into the embrace of free-market capitalism: "Those of us who lived through the years of the Great Slump still find it almost impossible to understand how the orthodoxies of the pure free market, then so obviously discredited, once again came to preside over a global period of depression in the late 1980s and 1990s, which once again, they were equally unable to understand or to deal with."
"As it happened, the regimes most deeply committed to laissez-faire economics were also sometimes, and notably in the case of Reagan's USA and Thatcher's Britain, profoundly and viscerally nationalist and distrustful of the outside world. The historian cannot but note that the two attitudes are contradictory." He points up the irony that "he most dynamic and rapidly growing economy of the globe after the fall of Soviet socialism was that of Communist China, leading Western business-school lectures and the authors of management manuals, a flourishing genre of literature, to scan the teachings of Confucius for the secrets of entrepreneurial success."
Ultimately, in world terms, he sees capitalism being just as much of a failure as state socialism: "The belief, following neoclassical economics, that unrestricted international trade would allow the poorer countries to come closer to the rich, runs counter to historical experience as well as common sense. ." (brackets in the original)
Read more about this topic: The Age Of Extremes
Famous quotes containing the words failure of, failure and/or capitalism:
“The moment a mere numerical superiority by either states or voters in this country proceeds to ignore the needs and desires of the minority, and for their own selfish purpose or advancement, hamper or oppress that minority, or debar them in any way from equal privileges and equal rights—that moment will mark the failure of our constitutional system.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to “feel good” about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Fact is Our Lord knew all about the power of money: He gave capitalism a tiny niche in His scheme of things, He gave it a chance, He even provided a first instalment of funds. Can you beat that? It’s so magnificent. God despises nothing. After all, if the deal had come off, Judas would probably have endowed sanatoriums, hospitals, public libraries or laboratories.”
—Georges Bernanos (1888–1948)