A New Episode of "Intervention"

Though state intervention in the economy and society as a whole has taken a royal ass-kicking at the hands of populist right-wing economists in the last 35 years, it's making a massive comback around the globe.

For those of you who find political economy boring, the gist of it is that due to what Andrew Coyne might call elementary logic, right-wingers believe that state-intervention is wrong and inefficient resulting in corruption and "stagflation" or the combination of high-unemployment and massive price increases (inflation).

Besides the fact that this point of view is generally argued by those economists who are wealthy and a) stand to lose the most in terms of government expropriation and equal tax distribution, b) have the resources to unequally influence the public through media and c) stand to gain the most through privatization in terms of new markets to aquire; these guys also tend to have a pretty deficient knowledge of history.

If they didn't they would be able to come to grips with the fact that historically the countires which have faired the best economically and in terms of poverty reduction have been those who have had the greatest degrees of state intervention in the economy (US, Europe, Japan). In fact modern day examples of this have been the Asian tigers, Scandianvia and the resurgence of Cuba's economy, crippled not by corruption, but by US state intervention.

It seems as though a bunch of countries aren't buying it though. To different degrees, Bolivia (extreme), Venezuala (medium) and Eithiopia (lite) have all been walking and talking like countries who believe in state intervention today. Though Canada decimated most of it's Crown Corporations in the last 20 years, it seems as though the Coservatives of the day are trying to dismantle yet another one as the Canadian Wheat Board battle continues.

The Dominion had a discussion during the last Liberal leadership debate where some people argued that the Liberal's new leader along with a number of other right-wing politicians globally are now using the issue of the environment as a justification to bring in a sort of 'new' stae-intervention. Will see how far it will go, or if the backlash against insanity economics finally comes North of South-America.