Is Intervention or Non-Intervention in
the Economy the Issue?
Much has been made of the fact that U.S.
President George W. Bush made an about-face in October when he supposedly went
against his long-standing opposition to state intervention in the economy and
handed over $700 billion to the big financial institutions. Similar claims of
an “ideological shift” were made when Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper
began speaking about the possibility of a deficit budget in Canada and bailouts
for the auto industry. These commentaries are discussing the issue as if
intervention in the economy is synonymous with increasing social spending.
However, this is far from the case.
When George W. Bush and Stephen Harper
were preaching against state intervention and equating non-intervention with
the public good, the state was busy transferring wealth from the public sector
into the pockets of the rich through various methods. One of those methods was
to increase the flow of taxation revenues to the rich financiers in the name of
“paying down the debt”. The claim was made that the only way to accomplish
this, which supposedly was good for the Canadian people, was to reduce
expenditures on social spending, such as health care, education and social
welfare. Another method was to privatize public assets at fire sale prices
under the hoax that the state should not intervene in the economy.
Now that the monopoly capitalist system
has gone into crisis and the profits of those same finance capitalists are
collapsing, Bush, Harper and their ilk are claiming that it is in the public
good to simply hand over truckloads of cash to them. If this is not done, they
say, working people will lose their jobs and suffer.
In reality there has been no ideological
shift and no change in position. The U.S., Canadian and other capitalist states
were intervening in the economy prior to this crisis in order to enrich the
monopoly capitalists and they are still intervening in the economy to enrich
the monopoly capitalists. All that has changed is the form of intervention.
Before an attempt was made to cover up the massive transfer of wealth from the
poor to the rich and now in is being done in broad daylight.
Bush, Harper and others like them have a
habit of talking out of both sides of their mouths. If it serves monopoly
capital for the state to pretend that it is not intervening in the economy, then
that is equated with serving the interests of the people; while if it serves
monopoly capital for the state to openly intervene in the economy, then that is
equated with serving the interests of the people. In fact, in both
circumstances it is the monopoly capitalists who benefit and the people who pay
the bill. How does this represent an ideological shift? An ideological shift
would be if Harper were to state that the monopoly capitalists and their system
are the source of this crisis and that they should, therefore, be the ones to
pay for it.