Get this: the Left understands markets…

…and the right doesn’t.

As an avid reader of both the Economist and much of the progressive media throughout most of the 1980’s, I have to say I was always more than a little disappointed that most of those who advocated progressive social and economic justice didn’t seem to get basic economic concepts. It was especially frustrating because I thought that much of the market intervention, done on behalf of the ‘right wing’ was anti-market, and engineered to create benefits to certain elites. I observed that these economic policies cascaded into social and political injustice that could only end in massive political instability, and would (probably) result in a USA that would look very much like the Third World. Of course, at exactly this time I was living fairly comfortably in Jackson Heights, Queens, NYC, but every day working (for 3 years) on a Hospital project in Morrisania, one of the most impoverished parts of the South Bronx so I didn’t really need much imagination to see the ends of the policies of that day. I just had to keep my eyes open.

Today, there is a host of leftists who understand market forces, and are entirely willing to thoughtfully engage market forces as agents of positive social change. Two groups bear special attention: One is the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado, USA and the other being the New Economics Foundation in London.

And what’s even more interesting is that there is abundant evidence that the right hasn’t a clue about markets, and are about to slide down a very slippery slope of massive interventionism. I wish I could say that Barack Obama wasn’t part of that group, but I am not sure that I can. (Of course, everything is relative. Barack is infinitely preferable over McCain, aka Bush-lite.)

A couple of interesting articles, one on each group, follow below the fold.

I hope he needs his Social Security someday…

A quite sick story, about a billionaire who is so upset that the middle class in America has devised a social safety net that he will spend a billion dollars of his own money to deprive them of it. You don’t get any more mean-spirited than this:

Vicious Ideologue Renews Attack on Social Security
Monday 21 July 2008
by: Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Billionaire investment banker Peter Peterson is back on the warpath. He just established a new foundation with a $1 billion endowment, the main purpose of which is to cut back spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

These programs, which provide an essential safety net to virtually the entire country, are hugely popular and will be politically difficult to cut. Nonetheless, $1 billion is a lot of money. Therefore, Peterson’s campaign deserves to be taken seriously.

Peterson has long been an ardent foe of these programs. He first rose to national prominence as commerce secretary in the Nixon administration. He then returned to the private sector and became a partner in the Blackstone Group, a very successful private equity fund.